The Core is Blackburn’s flagship floor pump and features a lightweight 6061-series aluminium construction, a nicely shaped ergonomic handle and a stable, three-point base. All good features, and the elements you’d expect to see on the best floor pumps for mountain bikes.

There’s only a bit of rubber on the tips of two of the struts, so in theory it could move around under your feet during inflating, but the Core is a High Pressure (HP) design, so we were never really working that hard.

However, that meant it took quite a while to get our test tyre up to pressure – after 30 strokes this pump had only put 15psi in the tyre, making it the slowest on test when compared to high-scoring Bontrager Dual Charger floor pump.

A large and easy-to-read gauge is user friendly

One of the reasons it doesn’t push that much air per stroke is because the Core 3 is a tall pump and our 5ft 10in testers found it awkward to get the handle to full extension, so we were actually under using its capacity. The Core also has an equally long hose, which is great for pumping up your tyres while on a bike stand and this all clips away easily on the side using U-shaped fasteners.

Blackburn is calling the pump head AirTap design but it’s almost identical to the one on the Lifeline Airblast. It has a simple threaded chuck that you swap over for Schrader or Presta valve types.

The head also features an integrated bleed button that Blackburn claims lets you bleed air from the tyre but we couldn’t get it to work correctly and it would only bleed air from the hose.

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