Presenting a slightly more wallet friendly option to the digital model, Lezyne’s Pressure Over Drive is a well made tubeless booster pump that seats tubeless tyres with reliable ease. While it’s not perfect, it’s relatively well priced and makes a convincing case as one of the best floor pumps.
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Lezyne Pressure Over Drive – Technical details
The Pressure Over Drive rocks a steel and aluminium construction, aside from the nicely shaped wooden handle. Sitting on top of the larger secondary chamber is its analogue gauge while an impressively lengthy, nylon-reinforced braided hose is located on the other end. The pump utilises Lezyne’s Presta and Schrader compatible ABS-1 Pro screw-on chuck. All of fits in quite a tidy package, as the hose loops around the handle and the head sits in a little hook at the base, through the foot-operated air release.
> Buy now: Lezyne Pressure Over Drive Floor Pump from Merlin Cycles for £124.99
The ABS-1 Pro is rather clever in its design. To switch from Schrader to Presta, the built-in adapter unscrews and can be flipped to accommodate your desired valve type. Then on the rear, there’s a handy valve core remover and there’s a pressure release button on the side to fine-tune those tyre pressures.
Lezyne Pressure Over Drive – Performance
My first impression of this pump is that, from its neat hose tidy to its foot-operated stainless steel air release, it’s very ergonomic. The wooden handle feels nice and offers up a good amount of grip and its foot provides just enough support to stop the pump from toppling while you pump away.
The magic of the Pressure Over Drive is that it’s primarily designed to make the often arduous task of tubeless tyre inflation that bit easier, by delivering high-volume air into the tyre very quickly to make it seat without any issue. It’s pretty easy going too, you simply lift the foot-operated lever into its ‘up’ position to inflate the secondary chamber (I usually go to 60psi) and press the lever. It then fires a continuous and long-lasting blast of air into the tyre until it seats.
As mentioned before, the hose on this pump is pretty long and while that might not mean much at first, it lets you get well clear of the danger zone. It’s a small plus but I like to stay away as far away from tubeless tyres as I seat the beads to avoid getting covered in sealant or in case anything unexpected happens.
Thanks to the narrow primary chamber, it doesn’t take much effort at all to reach a high enough pressure to seat a tyre. Unlike some others on the market, the action doesn’t stiffen up as the pressure inside the chamber rises. It’s consistent and gentle on the arms.
With this pump, I’ve successfully seated all sorts of tyres up to 2.6in width and with stiff, and wobbly sidewalls. Every one of these tyres has seated with ease, though, likely due to only inflating the secondary chamber up to 60psi, a few extra pumps are often needed to seat the whole of the beads.
While everything is looking rather golden, the Pressure Over Drive isn’t without a couple of flaws. Firstly, when you’re topping up your tyre pressures, you still need to fill that secondary chamber before air starts working its way into the tyre and the gauge offers a reading. So often, you’ll need to pump above your desired pressure to equalise the pressure between the pump and tyre to get that needle moving and then hang on the pressure release button to get back to your usual setting. It’s an extra bit of work that a number of other tubeless pumps on the market bypass.
Combine that with its narrow primary chamber and it takes a fair bit of effort to get a large volume tyre up to my desired pressure. It’s just not very efficient when used as a regular pump.
Another downside is that there are no markings or digits under the 20psi mark. Anyone who runs pressures beneath these values will have to reach for an independent pressure gauge for an accurate reading. I’ve also found that the gauge reads a two or three psi high when compared to others, so you’ll need to compensate when switching to a mini pump whilst trailside.
Lezyne Pressure Over Drive – Verdict
While the Lezyne Pressure Over Drive will set you back £150, it’s not too badly priced for the quality build that you get paired with its all-out reliability. It’s fully serviceable, too, with spares available from Lezyne.
The king of tubeless booster track pumps is Topeak’s Joe Blow Booster which will set you back £180 (£140 when tested). Like the Lezyne, it’s well made but Jon found that it inflates tyres more efficiently and you don’t need to fill the large chamber before it pumps air into the tyre.
Then if we go right to the other end of the scale, Lifeline’s AirBlast can be picked up for £70. While definitely cheap, it doesn’t have the build quality of the Pressure Drive. It’s also pretty inefficient when bypassing the secondary chamber, but that is something you can do with this AirBlast.
Other pumps that sit above £100 don’t come with the build quality of the Pressure Drive.
If you’re after a beautifully built track pump that can reliably and easily seat tubeless tyres but can work around a few quirks, the Lezyne Pressure Drive fits the bill very nicely. Though it would be vastly improved if it could bypass the larger chamber when not needed and with more markers on the gauge indicating lower pressures.
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Product purpose:
It makes tubeless set up hassle free and it’s easy to use.
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