Guess what! I got my Mini K-Pump the other day (left, 600g in the bag; ~$73) and gave it a go, topping up the Amigo at Old Dornie. The fat, 15-inch pump easily banged in the required psi into the floor, but getting to the side chamber valves wasn’t so easy (below). That required the angled nozzle supplied in the kit. Before I got a chance to fit that, the plunger or piston inside the housing got knocked off the shaft. Without a crosshead screwdriver I couldn’t fix that, but luckily I had the barrel pump at hand, so we achieved operational pressures in the end.
A quick reply from K-Pump apologised for the lack of adequate gluing on the plunger. With all the grease around the seal and the plunger / piston, I decided it was less work to fix the plunger to the shaft (right) with a couple of self tappers, rather than glue. Don’t know what I’m on about? Never mind ;-)
My very cheap Bravo two-way R.E.D ‘kite pump (left) is much faster at effortlessly inflating a rolled up IK out of the bag, but is of course too bulky to take on a plane. With the angle nozzle (right), the K-Pump Mini is a much handier and more compact top-up pump: I estimate it takes less than ten pumps to top up a chamber; about twice as many as the bulky Bravo kite pump. And I’ve since found it can inflate my Gumotex Seawave from flat in about 15 minutes (picture below, in Venice).
Years later, it’s still my back-up or top up pump, especially handy on my Seawave which had PRVs all round and so would purge, and also to get bigger packrafts like the Nomad S1 over lung pressure to make them good and taught.
It’s hard to buy a K-Pump in the UK and I’m not sure there is anything similar. A Decathlon 1.4L D/A barrel is not that much bigger, easy to buy and just 15 quid.
Pankanel in Greece has this to say:
I would also like to comment on the K-Pump Mini. I was looking for something compact and bought it from an online shop in Poland. When I first saw it, I was disappointed. It looked small for the job. Like a very fat version of my bike pump. But when I used it I was astonished. Side by side, it inflates the boat as fast as my high-pressure Bravo foot pump or an electric Bravo foot pump. Using an extension I made using a little garden hose, some duct tape, and three of the included adaptors (vinyl tubing, Boston adaptor, universal adaptor), I can now inflate the boat very fast, standing up, or even in the water. It is the best pump I have ever seen. I Imagine the bigger models will do miracles.
Inflatable Kayaks & Packrafts 