Some of you might have seen my post on Thapex tyre pumps - click here, and the post on making pump washers. As I said before, pumps bought from eBay, autojumbles and car boot sales arrive in unpredictable condition, cracked, with missing or tired washers and almost invariably without their connectors.
This article is about making those connectors, but first a word on terminology.
While researching these things, and looking for a longer pump hose that I could buy, I came to realise that the cycling world doesn't recognise the word 'hose' in connection with cycle pumps - indeed, cycle pumps are a bit passé these days having disappeared in favour of CO2 powered inflators. No - the cycling world seems to use the word 'connector'.
So, here we go. First we need a bit of hose - not too difficult, you can buy 1/4" braided fuel hose on eBay in various sizes - I bought 500 mm of 6.5 x 3mm black cotton braided hose for the princely sum of £2.68.
The difficult thing is always the ferrules, whether it is for a push bike or a motorcycle fuel line. They are either hideously expensive or just not available, so along comes another skip raid. Some time in the past I had acquired an aluminium cycle rack, the kind you put your shopping on and cycle home from town. It was full of weld but I had cut it up and stored it in my metal stock bin. It was 8mm OD. It machined well enough to make a couple of ferrules very easily - that is a 7 mm hole in the middle, they are 10 mm long and the 7 mm bore stops 1 mm short of the end. The end is drilled through 4 mm.
The aluminium bar gave me two replacement cooker knobs as well:
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