How do you maintain a kite pump? Our guest blogger Bert-Jan has written an extensive blog about kit pump maintenance.
Kitepump maintance
Maintaining your kite surf pump is not the first thing that comes to mind when maintaining your kite gear. But if you regularly use your pump on the beach, you will notice that the pumping feels rough.
After a few months, the pumping will take a little longer and feel a little rough as if there is sand in the pipe. That is correct and as a result, the pumping costs more power and it takes longer for your kite to be full, but even more important; sand can get into your kite bladder of the leading edge and that can never be good.
After a year or two I took my Mystic 2.9 liter double-action pump apart and cleaned it. It now pumps much better, I should have done this much earlier because it appears to be fixed in fifteen minutes. There fore is cleaning a pump like cleaning your wetsuit important to do.
Mystic 2.9 liter
My kite pump; a Mystic 2.9 liter with double-action (which means that if you close a plug, you also pump your kite into the piston when you pull the piston upwards, while at the same time there is a good chance that you load your back incorrectly ..).
Do this job outside on a large piece of cardboard / cloth because a lot of grease and sand will be released (corona gloves are not an unnecessary luxury, by the way). You also need a small Phillips screwdriver, a flat screwdriver, a lot of kitchen paper and a lubricant in the form of a jar of Vaseline / silicone spray.
Disassembling the kite pump
You can loosen the manometer counterclockwise to check the open-cell foam filter for damage and remove any sand. This filter enters the incoming air from the outside and therefore more sand if this filter is damaged. Even though this filter is new, sand can get through, so you should actually put your pump directly into your kite bag after use so that no sand can blow into it.
You can unscrew the cap of the black plastic tube counterclockwise, then you can pull the aluminum tube with piston completely out of the tube.
Then unscrew the handle counterclockwise from the aluminum tube (there may still be a long plastic tube attached to the handle, that should be the case). You can now slide the cap of the black plastic tube off the aluminum tube.
With a small Phillips screwdriver you can unscrew round white flange in the hood. Behind this flange is a flexible seal, rub everything squeaky clean and coat it generously with lubricant and then reassemble. You can also take the filter in the head apart and clean it, because air (and sand) also enters here if the plug is loose on the outside.
The piston
Clean the piston well, be careful with the four “rubber circles” that are on and under the piston, these are the valves that allow or do not let air through, do not remove it. You can carefully remove the large rubber seal from the piston with a flat screwdriver to clean everything better. Then put everything back in fresh lubricant.
Do not forget to also clean the large plastic tube yourself, especially on the bottom there may be an amount of caked grease with sand. If you are not a fat monkey your arm fits in the tube to the bottom. Then lubricate the inner wall with a little lubricant. Then put everything back together by hand and notice that the pumping then goes again as the fire brigade!
The technique of a kite pump
For the techies who are wondering what that plastic inner tube attached to the handle is for, here is an outline of how I think the kite pump works:
If you regularly maintain your kite pump in the above way, you would see that your pump lasts longer and that you are not pumping like crazy while hardly any air enters your kite.
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