Beto CJA-001S Tubeless Air Tank Inflator

The Beto CJA-001S Tubeless Air Tank Inflator is a workshop-quality tubeless air tank with well-thought-out features and excellent performance. It should last you a lifetime of tubeless setup, road or mountain.

Last year David reviewed the Airshot tubeless inflator and found it effective but costly at £60 (now £50). The key difference between the Airshot and the Beto tank on review here is size and weight. The Airshot will fit easily into a gearbag, whereas the Beto tank is much more of a workshop tool. At over four times the weight of the Airshot and considerably larger, you wouldn't want to be packing the Beto tank about the place.

That workshop-grade feeling helps make the Beto an attractive option for regular tubeless users. It stands on a wide stable foot, with a plastic carrying handle for easy relocation within the workshop or to a place where a sealant explosion is less of a problem. The Schrader refill valve is positioned on top and is protected by a plastic cowling, so if it gets knocked over the valve isn't going to be damaged. This is in comparison to the vulnerable Presta valve sticking out the top of the Airshot.

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The quality feeling of the Beto tank extends to the 70cm hose and fittings. The hose pivots at the tank, feeling solid and tightly-machined. The head likewise feels a quality bit of kit, with no adapter or switching required to inflate either Presta/Woods or Schrader. The insert that grips Presta valve cores is rubber-lined metal; again, no corners cut here. There's a plastic clip to hold the hose end when not in use, looping around a clip at the base to keep the hose secure.

The business end of the Beto Tank is the large grey air release lever on the side – not a small, fiddly tap as on the Airshot. This is good because you'll probably find yourself with only one hand free during a tubeless mounting session, so a tank that sits stable on the floor and can be operated with one hand is A Good Thing. The lever is able to release air gradually, not a binary open-closed action. The tank took about 40 strokes of my long-lived Bontrager Charger floorpump to get to 120PSI. Beto recommend 120-140PSI, and there's a safety cutout valve on the bottom at 180PSI, which incorporates a moisture release function too, though Beto make no mention of how often or how this should be actuated.

A feature of the Beto tank is an air bypass function, which allows you to continue inflating a tyre using your trackpump still connected to the tank. I never found this to be necessary, as all the tyres I tried seated fine the first time, but it's nice to know it's possible.

With 120PSI in the tank I was able to seat a 30mm tubeless road tyre, the first shot with no sealant to get the tyre tight on the rim at 70PSI without excess mess. Then I released all the air, inserted sealant using the rather fab Milkit system and refilled again with a valve core in place this time, managing a perfectly respectable 40PSI the second time around. So, seat, deflate, fill with sealant and reinflate tyre, all with one charge.

With 120PSI in the tank I was able to seat and fill a 2.3in mountain bike tyre to 18PSI with no problems at all. The capacity was more than enough to get both beads seated, and using the pass-through feature, if you wanted or needed to get the tyre a bit harder you could do so without disturbing the connection to the valve.

As tubeless becomes a feature of many road as well as mountain bikes, the need to seat and inflate tyres without resorting to a bike shop trip will become more and more common. For the price of an average track pump the Beto Tubeless Air Tank gives you the ability to DIY with workshop-grade speed and quality.

Verdict

Top-quality workshop-grade tubeless inflator at a sensible price