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My $80 borescope saved me from a $2,400 mistake, but not the way you think
Everyone raves about using a borescope to inspect cylinders and find damage before teardown. I spent $80 on a cheap wireless one to check a PT6 hot section on a Cessna Caravan last month in Fort Worth, and honestly it showed me nothing useful, the image was grainy and the light washed out everything. But that cheap tool caught a cracked B-nut on a fuel line behind the accessory gearbox that I would have missed until the engine came apart. The borescope paid for itself right there, but the popular opinion that you need a $1,500 Olympus unit to do real work is just nonsense. Anyone else find that the budget tools work fine for the boring stuff, or am I just lucky so far? My lead mechanic laughed at me for buying it, but he stopped when we pulled the line and saw the fuel weeping. What cheap tool have you bought that actually pulled its weight on an inspection?
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emmakim9d ago
Budget tools catch the weird stuff that fancy ones miss because you actually use them. I grabbed a $60 endoscope off Amazon for a prebuy on a 182 and it found a nest of mud dauber junk packed into the tailcone that the "real" inspection completely skipped. The picture was trash but I could tell something was in there, and that was enough to know I needed to look closer with my eyes. My rule now is cheap scope for finding problems and good eyes for judging them, and half the time the cheap one is the one that actually gets grabbed because it lives in the truck. The guys who laugh at cheap tools are usually the same ones who never pull them out because the good one is locked up in the shop.
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