Pics Inside Cylinders
 

Yesterday I went outside and tried examining down inside the cylinders, with the Triplett Cobracam USB inspection camera I picked up at Northern Tool last week, and posted a link to in another thread. Nice feature is I was able to save snapshots directly to the hard drive on my laptop.

On cylinders 2 and 5, they were far enough toward the bottom of their stroke I was able to angle the camera head and get a view of the cylinder walls as well. All theses views were taken thru the prechamber holes in the head.

87 300D Turbo, Build date 7/86, OM 603.960, approx 213K miles on vehicle. First pic is inside cylinder 2.

More pics inside cylinder 2.

Pics inside cylinder 5.

What I'm seeing on those cylinder walls pleases me - the crosshatching on the liners is still quite distinct and visible - tells me they're still in very good shape, and if the pistons and rings are still in good shape, it should have good compression as well - evidenced by the fact that in weeks previous, even with 2 bad glow plugs, I had little trouble starting it cold iron after sitting for a week other than some initial suttering and stumbling for about 15 to 20 seconds.

The camera gave a nice full screen view, and the original saved snapshots were 900 KB at the default setting. These pics were resized down to 65 KB using Windows Live Photo Gallery in Windows 7.

Sent off my injectors yesterday to DBW LLC to have them gone over. Prechambers were in excellent shape, only a thin tightly adhering layer of soot/carbon on them, easily removed with gasoline, brass wire brush, and brake parts cleaner - reinforces my belief that there has been some major maintenance done to this engine in the recent past.

Still to be done - new water pump and thermostat - simply on general principles given the age of the vehicle - last week with new coolant bottle installed, and fixing a loose clamp on the upper rad hose, coolant system held 20 psi for 3 hours cold with no leaks using a pressure tester - new radiator already on hand - change out the o-rings, copper seals, and springs in the IP delivery valves - new glow plugs already on hand - install new IP bypass/relief valve.

Lots of those bore scopes on ebay. The more there are ... the cheeper they will get.

I picked one up but have not used it yet.

Cool pics! I have one of the HF camera scopes and I'm always poking it in stuff :D

Ive seen a junkyard buyer using it on engines and said he would only do a purchase if the scope inspection came back good.