Flexible Borescope - The GOLD STANDARD

Flexible Borescopes are a powerful tool in the NDT and inspection realm, unfortunately they go under utilized within the general aviation recip world. Whether it’s for a pre-buy, an annual, a 100 hour, or just servicing… any time your spark plugs are out, 20 minutes should be spent borescoping your engine. Flexible Borescopes give you the opportunity to find issues that can go totally undetedcted with a traditional compression test.

Flexible Borescope of tiny little camera, located on the end of an articulation probe can give us a 360 degree view of the inside of our combustion chamber revealing the health of our engine.

We can check the condition of…
⁃ Cylinder walls--We want to see: healthy cross hatching. We will always see a little oil collected at the lowest point of a cylinder.
• We don’t want to see: scoring, pitting, glazing, corrosion
⁃ Valves (especially the exhaust valve)
• We want to see: heathy symmetrical bulls eye “burnt pizzas”. With this you can assure the valves are seating and rotating properly during operation as well as tell how rich or lean you run your engine.
• We don’t want to see: asymmetrical marks which are a sign of heat concentration. This means the valve is on the verge of failure… although the cylinder may still have a good compression reading.
⁃ Condition of piston rings, you can tell if they are stuck or busted
⁃ Cracks, usually found at the top of the cylinder around spark plug holes or sometimes valve seats.
⁃ Signs of detonation showing up in the cylinder head area near spark plugs and valves
⁃ Signs of an RPM over speed by smiley faces showing up on the piston head.
⁃ Condition of valve seats and stems. We don’t want to see oil on a valve stem.

For $200 every shop should have one, and with todays modern technology every mechanic should be taught how to operate, read, and understand the story the inside of our cylinders are telling us.

Also very handy for inspecting areas inside the fuse, wings, tanks, control surfaces.

Flexible Borescope checking engine takes a trained eye but it is the way of the future, giving us so much insight and piece of mind.