A shock pump seems like a pretty simple little high pressure pump for setting sag and pressure on your forks and air shocks. Making sure that your suspension is set up properly and adjusted for the type of trail you are riding is essential for getting the most performance out of your mountain bike. This could be adding air to a fork, adding or removing volume spacers, or setting up sag.
A shock pump is different from a normal tire pump or even an air compressor. They are designed with a single purpose to adjust high pressure air of a air shock or air fork in small increments. Most tire pumps can’t get much hire that 100 PSI. However, shock pumps are designed to pump up to 300 PSI.
We have used a half dozen shock pumps over the last decade, and really wanted to start keeping a closer eye on air levels. With a needle gauge pump it’s often hard to know exactly where the needle lies. In fact with some pumps you can put a few pumps into a shock and the needle wouldn’t even move. It was time for an upgrade.
There are not many digital pumps on the market for shocks. In fact the few that we have seen look like the are all coming from the same factory. However, once you go with a digital pump, it will be impossible to go back to a gauge. They are highly reliable, and accurate, we have double checked them with other pumps and gauges and been extremely satisfied with the reading on the Fox digital pump.
There is this one that looks an awful lot like the Fox pump above, but is branded with a Rockshox logo.
The handle, body and hose of the digital shock pump is pretty similar to everything else on the market. It suffers from the same issues of the schrader valve only freely until it there is some resistance, then the entire pump has to rotate to get is screwed onto the fork. The bleed valve is also a nice feature, but hard to control. Typically, it requires a bleed, which ends up letting too much air out. Then adding air back in.
The Fox digital shock pump is one of the best pumps we have used. It has always been reliable. The pressures are repeatable. There is a little pressure loss when reading the gauge, so keep this in mind when connecting just to test pressure. The Rockshox pump seems to run a little cheaper on Amazon, but be sure to pick the shock that matches your bike, unless your running RS shock and Fox forks, then your out of luck.