The team at Flextail pump wants to build small and powerful air pumps for quick inflation of outdoor goods. Current methods are too slow, cost too much money, or require a vehicle charging port with short cords to inflate. The team is currently running a successful Indiegogo campaign for their Flextail MAX PUMP system.
FLEXTAIL from iseejjj3 on Vimeo.
The pump has a 3600 milliamp hour battery that takes two hours to charge through a USB cord, and will inflate an estimated twenty air mattresses or vacuum compress forty five bags on a single charge. The housing for the pump is 53 millimeters in diameter and 81 millimeters tall. The pump weighs 135 grams.
Comparisons between Flextail and a larger commercially available pump were uploaded today in a series of two videos. The MAX PUMP reached 21.0 meters per second while the commercial pump only hit 8.6 meters per second. This is not a fair comparison because it does not take the nozzle diameter into account so not truly measuring the rate at which a volume can be inflated.
Another curious aspect of this crowdfunding campaign is the fact that this product seems to have been sold a few years ago in China, with a different name and price point. The previous pump is said to only inflate at 1.8 pounds per square inch (again, this is a pressure measurement and not a volumetric flow rate) and did not ship with a lithium battery.
Flextail looks like a great pump that meets the design goals of reducing pumping time and being smaller and portable. There’s a glaring language or culture barrier between the Chinese students and young engineers and the North American crowdfunding audience, but that hasn’t stopped the campaign from raising more than $60,000. Units are expected to ship in August 2016 and the campaign ends on July 14.