If you’re anything like me, you’ll have long ago ditched carrying a pack, and now I’m even at the point of ditching the hip belt, if I can help it. Being a mountain bike minimalist has been made easier recently because more bikes than ever now come with storage, be it inside the downtube, handing off the top tube, or secreted in any number of bike orifices. It’s also now possible thanks to the proliferation of compact and lightweight bits of kit and tools, like this tiny Topeak Nano Shock pump.

The Nano Shock pump is the smallest inflator I’ve found, making it ideal if you want to ditch the pack or just travel light

Design and specifications

The best suspension shock pumps feature valves and long-reach handles to precisely and quickly add air to your shock, but the Topeak Nano Shock has none of that. It weighs in at just 58g and measuring just 13.5cm long, meaning it will fit in my jersey or trouser pocket, a frame stash, or the most minimal of hip packs. The Nano weighs next to nothing (Google tells me not much more than a box of matches), doesn’t have any sharp edges or pointy bits if you accidentally take a tumble and land on it and is perfect for carrying all the time for a trailside adjustment.

With a tiny stroke I needed to pump pretty hard to move the needle on my shock pressure

With a tiny stroke length and no gauge, it won’t replace a proper shock pump. But it’s become an essential bit of kit for the on-the-fly fettler like me, and I like to have it just in case I need to do some emergency inflation on a mate’s bike.

Topeak’s look and finish is sleek and tidy with the main body black aluminium and a posh braided hose and connector also in smart matt black. Both hose and valve head clip in close to the body for storage, but also rotate around 360°, so it’s easy to squeeze into awkward shock valve placements or use on bikes with shock tunnels and partially obscured Schrader valves. The brand says it can inflate up to 300psi, but I’ve not been much over 240psi on any bike I’ve used it on to test this. Claimed air flow is 4.8cc for every stroke.

The Pressure Rite vavle is simple but effective, it stops air leaving the shock as you threddle it off

The Nano’s quality head has a two-stage ‘Pressure-Rite’ valve, which protects the shock or fork valve and acts to isolate the pump’s chamber from the shock. That means I found it easy to put on and off without losing air when removing the pump.

Performance

The Nano pump action is obviously a bit shorter than a normal pump and the skinny 1.5cm diameter body means it took quite a bit more cycling than usual to inflate my completely flat shock or fork. It can still do it fine though, and with a fast pumping action it’s perfectly effective for adding extra air when I needed to tune the air spring on my suspension. Topeak’s max pressure rating of 300psi might be quite hard going as the Nano already feels fairly hard to compress at around 240psi, which is as hard as I’ve taken it.

There’s no way to bleed air from my shock or fork using the pump itself, so the only option is to carefully use a stick or something pointy to give a little psst by pushing directly on the valve. There’s a bit of a knack to this and a tiny blip can release a reasonable amount of pressure, so this is one aspect where a regular pump with a bleed button and guage is definitely superior.

Like the best Christmas cracker fillers, the Nano is dinky but surprisingly useful