Tennis ball pump

It may be remembered that I have an abstract interest in pumping up tennis balls.

A plastic tube, all this past fortnight.

This interest resurrected itself when a tubeless tyre refused to hold pressure and I had recourse to the bicycle shop which has a compressor.  There I found a New Device called a flash pump into which we will not go since Google will take us there if we're interested and anyway nobody is. Reading this. Unless I'm sore mistaken.

Persons unknown have made their own flash pumps all over Youtube and you may youtuble them, I expect, if the subject enthralls.

I have confined myself to gluing ends on a bit of PVC pipe, one of which screws off and didn't quite seal on an 80mm O-ring cos I couldn't get enough torsion twixt lid and pipe.  Accordingly I machined a large tight hole in a bit of oak and chopped it in half and got a better purchase on the pipe in the bench vice and that worked: the tyre pressure gauge revealed that 60psi still remained within from Waitangi day until this afternoon, viz., for two weeks.

JE Gordon (p119-123, Structures) told me that the pipe is twice as likely to burst like a sausage than the ends are likely to shoot off, but they - the ends - are a bit bulging and I housed this thing out in the shed in case I got that wrong and it transformed itself into a pipe bomb.  Which is itself stupid: I should have put it in the grapefruit tree and then only grapefruits rather than sheds will be damaged.

The balls were sealed inside and the test to see if some of the 60psi leaked into them was done by dropping them on a concrete floor and seeing if they bounce as high as a new tennis ball. They didn't. Well, one did, but four others were mediocre and one bounced with little enthusiasm. So they're back in the pipe and back up to 60psi for another week and we'll see how long it takes before they all go bouncy.

The pipe, if this is of interest, has an OD of 82mm and a wall thickness of 3.4mm and somehow or other I calculated this would give a safe working pressure of 115 psi but I can't recall what possessed me to come to that conclusion. Was it a website somewhere? Anyway it seems safe at 60 psi. The inlet valve is a Presta valve cut from an old inner tube, sealed on the inside merely with the remnant of the rubber inner tube and the locking ring tightened with pliers on the outside of the end cap. 

What all the Youtublers do is fit a second Presta valve, connect it to the putative tubeless wheel valve with a bit of soft plastic pipe, fold the plastic pipe over and nip it closed with a Mole grip.  The device is pumped to something approaching pressure vs volume, the Mole grips flicked open, and the outrush of air is claimed to seat the tubeless tyre on its rim.  Some Youtublers claim that a plastic fizzy drinks bottle will hold 150 psi and so it might if it's a small one, but I have bitter experience of this and can assure you a three litre fizzy drinks bottle will swell and burst at 130psi and woe betide your hand if you chance to be holding it while this bursting occurs.  Compressed air is a lot more dangerous than folks imagine.

There are so many videos online that I can't be bothered to locate one for viewing pleasure, but the general clues used by Mr and Mrs Google are cheap ghetto tubeless inflator.

Tennis Balls

Inasmuch as one can summarise the matter, the purpose of a Blog is to whine about the cruelty of the world in not behaving as the television advertisements would have us believe it behaves. Endless happiness, we are taught, will result from effecting the purchase of a mock-leather sofa and two mock-leather armchairs on easy credit terms. - Come to think of it this may be true, since I have never tried the experiment of actually buying any TV crap although the advertisers' job is rendered a bit harder by the fact that I do not own a television. If I want to see a film it necessitates a car journey, and if the film is The Age of Stupid, the concomitant guilt as I drive home afterwards. And then I fall to thinking about First World Problems and whether one really should complain - as this morning - about a blunt table knife when 24,000 third world children die of starvation every day. (Though why do we all tolerate the daily frustration of pressing a blunt knife through a piece of bread to divide it in two?) - Actually I keep a table knife, repaired with a gross epoxied wooden handle, sharpened on a stone and finished with one of those cheap plastic diamond files that I don't know how we ever managed without, and it cuts closed cell polyurethane foam like nobody's business, and the reason it needs to is because I've just been making frames to go in the windows to hold insulating sheets of 3mm cast acrylic which I was going to do several years ago and which thought received no follow-up until the recent stunningly cold weather. You need the foam to block the cracks. And you need to carve it thinner afterwards because it isn't as compressible as you think when planning the venture.

My wife's First World Problem concerns tennis balls rather than blunt knives or faux leather sofas. Motueka Tennis Club, like all clubs, is riven with faction and secret hatred, half the committee leaving in a huff and the other half insisting that Slazenger balls are no longer bought and the club switches to Wilson on the grounds that the NZ Tennis Association has received corporate sponsorship. Unf. it seems that Wilson balls are a bit flabby, which my wife's tennis coach has now proven by dropping them on concrete and seeing how high they bounce. (Not as high.)

The reader of this blog - when I remind him, there still is one - is already aware of my addiction to perverse uses of compressed air, and is also aware that one of my brothers is an engineer who designed an enormous machine for one of the companies who makes tennis balls. Resulting from his research he - the brother - told me how tennis balls are pressurized, which of course is one of those problems you never think of until someone points it out. - A tennis ball has no valve: how do you get compressed air into it? - Well my brother told me how, and it's done like this: you get a tennis ball and put it into a sealed chamber filled with compressed air. And in the reverse of the process whereby your tyres go flat if you leave a bike for a month in the garage, the tennis balls become compresseder inside the sealed chamber. Which is why tennis balls are sold in pressurized tubes. Which fact I didn't know because I never buy tennis balls.

So in order to further irritate the remaining members of the Committee (my wife is of the Slazenger faction) I have hit on the plan of taking Wilson balls and pressurizing them to Slazenger standards, and if they'll stand it, beyond. It would be fun to see some elderly biddy - all the Committee are biddies, mostly elderly - pat a ball with what is termed a Lollipop Serve (we are now familiar with senior citizen sporting slang) and be startled to see it shoot out of the courts onto the roof of Motueka Library.

Experiment 1. Cut a car tyre and insert it into the leg of a pair of trousers, a button-hole sewn for the extrusion of the valve. Fill with balls. Clamp ends in wooden clamps to seal. Pump.
Result. At about 18 psi the entire seam of the trouser ruptures.
Conclusion: Du'n't work.

A burst trouser

Experiment 2. Take Golden Syrup tin and solder Schrader valve into base. Insert tennis ball. Pump.
Result. Hissing.
Conclusion. Needs a seal round the lid.

Experiment 3. Cut up whoopee cushion (did my wife really give the children one for Christmas? What was she thinking?) to make a sheet of latex. Put between tin and lid. Pump.
Result. Lid comes off.
Conclusion. Of course it does, stupid. High pressure x Big area = Huge force.

Experiment 4. Repeat, with tin contained between clamped wooden supports.
Result. Lid distends in the unsupported middle, and hisses.
Conclusion. Lid needs support in the middle.

A distended syrup tin lid. And a Mappin and Webb knife, sharpened, with a not-very-Mappin and Webb handle.

Experiment 5. Cut circle of plywood to support new (obv.) lid.
Result. 100 psi! - But after one hour, it was down to 0 psi.
Conclusion. I shall have to do the job properly and sew a helical tube of strong nylon webbing to contain the pressure, which I secretly knew all along because that's what happened when I was playing with this idea yonks ago. Which I don't want to do because I hate sewing. And which my wife won't do - I guarantee this - because she doesn't engage in tennis ball sabotage.



And no, since you ask, I haven't done any more on John's High racer. Too cold. And the West Bank Road, in permanent winter shade, is now a sheet of black ice.