this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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Buy an accurate tire gauge! - Or: How I lost my sanity looking for The Lost Leak (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca to c/motorcycles@lemmy.world
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I posted a couple days ago https://lemmy.ca/post/48328336 complaining about losing 2-5 psi per day and always having to top up air.

This was because all the tire pressure gauges I was using were utter GARBAGE. It seems this is the norm. Not only are the gauges on air pumps wrong, the air pumps are even wrong about how much air they put out.

This led me to believe I had leaks in my tires. Because every time I test them with the built in gauge, they would show up as random-ass numbers. And when I pumped air into them, it gave me more garbage about how much went in.

I was sure I had pumped too much air into the tires. Turns out they never had enough air to begin with since I received it off the delivery truck. I’ve been riding 2300km a fair bit deflated.

Now to relearn how my bike handles (because for some reason, every time I inflated it the bike handled better 🙄😒). Just noob things.

My bike has held a constant exact pressure for 24h and is finally at recommended psi. Moral of the story, research accurate and calibrated digital tire gauges and don’t trust air compressors either.

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[–] GeneralDingus@lemmy.cafe 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Makes me wonder about my air compressor now. Do you have any recs?

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 2 points 2 weeks ago

Well, just always use an external guage. The guage on pumps are just not accurate

[–] PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago

Any air compressor is fine. You just also need to test afterwards with a calibrated gauge. That’s what I did. I found that roughly 4 psi on my $30 portable pump is actually closer to 1 psi with my gauge.

So I went back and forth a bit. Pump, measure, pump, measure.