Clarke CAR8MC 8m Retractable Air Hose Reel

After watering the garden for x-number of years with a garden hose pipe, you might find it hard to get excited about an airline hose for the man cave. Well maybe. But when it’s attached to a drum reel that auto-retracts, you’ll smile in appreciation every time using the Clarke CAR8MC 8m Retractable Air Hose Reel. We know this is early in the review but, honestly, it’s a 10/10 Visordown rated piece of equipment.

As the name suggests, 8-metres of rubber airline is wrapped around a drum reel. Pull the end of the hose line and the reel unwinds the hose as quick as you can pull it to your chosen location despite being spring loaded. This can be the front or rear wheel of your motorcycle, where you’d connect, say, a Clarke TPG30P Airline Tyre Inflator to blow up the tyres. Another example would be a Clarke heavy duty air impact wrench; particularly useful for the usual stubborn front sprocket retaining nut or seized engine mount. Let’s not forget that although we are motorcyclists, most of use have use of a cheap, runaround car especially in winter – a cheap winter hack that eight times out of ten needs repairing more often than any bike!

Now, the real tasty reasons to purchase the Clarke CAR8MC. An auto stop (cam-lock) feature stops the spring-loaded reel from fully retracting the hose. Brilliant! To unlock the positive stop mechanism, just pull the hose again and let it smoothly retract. This means you can pull out fully 8-metres of hose, or anywhere in-between and it stays there. In the three years of ownership and abuse, the hose has never got snagged up as it retracts, and the cam stop has never, ever let go. That’s also three years of not tripping over an airline hose that would ordinarily be left draped across a floor because no-one ever bothers to coil up/hang up a loose airline hose after just 30 seconds use.

The main body and reel of the Clarke CAR8MC is steel. Yes, it’s a hefty bit of kit (10.8kg) but it’s designed for bike/car workshop use, where it will get some proper hammer! It’s also solid-like because it can be mounted flush to a wall or hung from a roof joist via four mounting slots cut in the steel mounting plate – the slots are slotted to allow for position adjustment. We used 13mm bolt head, 8mm shank screws. It hasn’t budged!

The hose end feeds through a guide plate that has nylon roller bars on all four sides to ensure smooth pull and retract operation. The hose end can’t disappear through the guide and spin the reel into oblivion or flop down because of a damper stop – a large plastic block clamped around the hose. Simple but perfect.

The hose itself is rubber with internal cord reinforcement – flexible but tough. Outside diameter (OD) is 16mm and the inside diameter (ID) is approx. 9.6mm. That’s quite a bore size; most airline hoses are 8mm. Used in conjunction with XF (Extra Flow) EU-style QD couplings, air flow restriction is minimal. This fast and hard charge of air makes it ideal for rapid inflation when fitting new tubeless tyres. Hose to coupling connection is made via a traditional ¼-inch threaded male boss pre-mounted to the hose end. The same type of fitting is on the compressor connection hose that snakes out from the side of the reel. This too requires another EU-type coupling.

To sum up the Clarke CAR8MC 8m Retractable Air Hose Reel is easy: even at £82.79 there are no disadvantages in buying one, only advantages. If you do need a little more length, a 15-metre version (Clarke CAR15MC) is also available from Machine Mart.

To find out more or to buy, head to the Machine Mart website.

You can find Visordown's full range of workshop tools and equipment reviews here.