tyre pressure guage

Jamec tyre gauge

This is what i use, mine has a 45 degree chuck though - looks identical, just the end piece is set at 45, can fit in the road bike front wheel with dual 300mm discs, cars and fourbys are easy, seems accurate too (reads the same as every other gauge i tried it against)

I think mine came from bursons.

BUSHRANGER from ANACONDA they are about $40 and have a feature that if you pump up too much you just push the shaft towards the valve and it deflates it.

Easy as. comes in a little zipper bag and all.
Use it to check tyres in morning an it is within half a pound of the reading on my pressure senders .

Cheers

Hii John,

I have a number of gauges from supercheap, two short stem and one stethescope type gauge, with an easy to read dial. Around the twenty dollar mark and all three are accurate to within 0.5 psi, in the range between 50 psi and 10 psi. Depending on the type of rim fitted to your vehicle, some gauges may be difficult to get onto the valve stem for an accurate reading and well worth checking out before purchase. ARB, usual disclaimer, have a gauge with an incorporated deflator that is relatively easy to use and is around the seventy dollar mark.
The difference between a good gauge and a cheap gauge when you drop it?? ....... about fifty dollars ... lol

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Wayne.

I also have a digital tyre pressure gauge from Bushranger, but it must be the "base" model. It doesn't have a fancy deflation apparatus but merely does its job of measuring tyre pressure and does this very well.

I paid less than $20 for it about 6 years ago from Kmart and it is a very practical tool indeed.

You press the on button to switch it on and after it has been given a sufficient breath of life, it beeps to you that it is satisfied and displays the results to you on an easy to read display. A three second press of the on button will change the calibration from psi to bar (and Visa versa) and after a couple of minutes of non use, it will shut itself down automatically.

How accurate is it? Don't care as this is somewhat irrelevant.
Who cares if it is three psi difference than an ultra expensive gauge and even then, how do you determine which one is more correct?
Consistency of results is what you need for a practical gauge.

My old mechanical pencil type "plunger" gauge had a tendency to stick. I replaced this with a not cheap clock dial type gauge but this has sat in my compressor box as a "spare" as I couldn't read the result without the need for my reading glasses and thus the justification for a digital type gauge with an easily read display and an audible alarm.

Bill

Well it does depend on what you consider an arm and a leg (probably my suggestion), I brought Hubby this Draper Gauge, it's top quality and in my opinion worth the money, it maybe have been cheaper when I got it though (can't remember). It has good precision (increments) and it holds the reading until you press a little button (so you can remove it from your tire to read if necessary). I consider it a good thing that it's not digital (won't run out of batteries) as well.

This is the place I brought it from, and was happy with their service too (over the net).

Draper Gauge from TW Performance

But on a side note I have a Topeak branded digital gauge that I keep in my car (normally use it for my mountain bikes as it does schrader and presta valves), it's not a bad gauge, only annoying thing is having to turn it off and on every time you want to do another reading! I think it was about $40.

I did look into Ebay ones that look like the Draper, but it was hard to find ones that had the same quality or the same sort of accuracy (increments and to what max psi they read - similar to when you're shopping for good scales)

Picture of the Draper...


And link to the Topeak Smart Gauge (I can highly recommend Phantom Cycles, but Deanwoods is cheaper it seems)
Topeak at Phantom Cycles

Topeap at Deanwoods



We've had both gauges for at least two years and have been happy with both, I do like the Draper better but I never get to use it because it's in Hubby's car :(

I also agree on the accuracy comments - it's consistency one is after with gauges so comparing different ones as to how accurate they are to each other isn't much use unless you are using different gauges all the time!
As you may have noticed I merely class accuracy as showing smaller increments (like being able to read to 1psi rather than 5psi increments) and I think this is where the higher cost comes in (like with scales) if you want a gauge that will read accurately to 1psi increments but still have a large range (say 1-100psi) then I guess you end up paying more. In some ways it seems that digital gauges tend to get around that and offer the same range and increments for a much cheaper price!

When it comes down to it I think a person could be just as happy with a $20 gauge as they would as a $60 one, providing you're using the same gauge and it gives consistent readings then pressure is just relative isn't it. I suppose though if the gauge isn't well calibrated you might or might not discover that your tires (tyres !) are under / over inflated compared to what they should be, and in some ways one could argue that buying a cheap gauge could potentially cost you in the long run (premature tyre wear?). But hell you can complicate the choice of any product can't you!!!!

Hi (again) John,

Maybe I missed something in your original post .... that others saw.

Accurate .............. reliable ............. easy to use ......

While some consider that accuracy is NOT important, it was a stated criteria for a replacement and while three gauges of differing origin may not be a basis for a scientific approach, my reply was trying to indicate that cheaper gauges may be suitable for the requiered task.
I do agree with Bill ..... .to a point ........... that the reading on a given gauge may differ to the actual pressure of the tyre ............ consistancy is more important!

I also read that cost is important ............ Supercheap currently have these gauges at the sub twenty dollar mark ..........

Pebble did indicate that the increments on a gauge are important too ....... going to a mark on the gauge ..... without my glasses on ..................... is no problem with the gauges I have.

FWIW........... taking into account the cost of rims and tyres on current vehicles .............. twenty dollars for an accurate gauge is peanuts.

Cheers,
Wayne.

Thank you everyone for your comments. I raised the question here because I've had such variable experiences with tyre pressure gauges. There's also that business of learning from your own mistakes, but it's much cheaper to learn from other people's!

I've had 2 cheap digital gauges from SuperCheap. The first one was good (i.e. consistent and I reckoned satisfactorily accurate.) So when it died (probably battery) I bought a second identical one. Inconsistent readings, needed to be rebooted between readings, a real pita. So I bought two cheap piston/cylinder types. One was obviously wrong, the other didn't hold its reading when removed from the valve.

One course of action is to simply spend more money on the assumption that the more expensive ones are better. That sort of assumption is often wrong though.

Some interesting comments regarding the distinction between resolution and and accuracy. We do tend to assume that measuring to 3 decimal places is more accurate than to 1 decimal place. Not true of course, it's just a higher resolution reading. With tyres I reckon reliability and reproduceability of measurements are more important than resolution and accuracy. Certainly resolution is a very low priority, and accuracy to within 5% is probably just fine, so long as the error is consistent.

Thank you for your interesting comments.

Cheers

John