What Is the Best Borescope for Automotive Inspections

Borescopes are specialized tools used to inspect and examine confined spaces. Many manufacturers make borescopes designed specifically to view a car’s internal parts. If you are interested in purchasing one of these specialized tools, you may get overwhelmed by the large number of borescopes on the market. Of course, we all want the best return on our investment regardless of our specific activity. The best borescopes or inspection cameras have become a must-have tool for automotive manufacturers and professional aftermarket maintenance professionals. This portable inspection camera is an ideal and must-have tool for mechanics and car enthusiasts, as it’ll give a clear view of the hard-to-see engine or body parts without hours of disassembling or tearing apart a well-built system.

This guide will go through the best automotive borescopes available and also discuss the criteria used in selecting the right one.

Endoscopes can be simply described as a tiny camera at the end of a flexible wand that can be moved into places that would be unreachable with normal efforts – short of tearing the whole thing apart and looking inside, removing covers, panels, or other inaccessible parts.

Whether you’re trying to find the source of an oil leak, locating a lost nut, or confirming the health of piston heads or valves, the applications for this micro camera are nearly limitless for automotive inspections.

Borescopes are used to identify problems inside an automotive engine for cost-effective repair and maintenance. Of course, as you shop around, there are many borescope options to consider. As an automotive professional, you know how important it is for your tool to meet and perform in more than one singular application.

How to Choose an Automotive Borescope

Automotive endoscopes are essentially endoscopes used in the inspection of internal components. Many auto mechanics keep a borescope on hand to check for internal damage or defects in your car engine. We may have heard of a colonoscopy where the doctor will use a flexible probe with a camera at the end to view and diagnose the condition of the patient. Well, you can say that a borescope is a ‘colonoscopy’ for engines! The same features and functions are used by medical professionals to diagnose and address life-threatening issues in the human body which is the same technology that you will use to diagnose engine life issues in your vehicle.

To perform their job correctly, automotive borescopes need to be small, flexible, portable and provide high-resolution photographs and videos.

Probe Size

The size of the probe on the borescope is important, as it needs to be large enough to facilitate a camera but narrow enough to fit into a confined space. For example, Diesel engines have very small tubes and can accommodate only borescopes that are 6mm or less in diameter.

The most popular diameter borescope wand is a 6mm. This diameter will easily enter a spark plug hole and allow you to view the entire piston head and cylinder walls. An engine borescope with articulation will allow you to steer or maneuver the probe tip to view the cylinder walls and if you have a bore scope that offers 180 degrees of articulation or a side view tip, you will be able to inspect the cylinder valve at the same time.

The ability to perform borescope automotive cylinder, cylinder wall, and valve inspections without having to invest in the arduous labor of tearing the engine down could save you not only hours of work but your customer hundreds of dollars.