Rental bore scope that looks sideways?

Do any of you know of an auto parts store which rents/loans the kind of bore scope that looks sideways instead of or in addition to just along the axis of the cable? The one at Autozone supposedly has the little mirror that can be clipped to the cable, but I tried one of those once and it was tough to make out anything. Horrible optics.

This isn't for the Prius luckily. The wife's 98 Accord has "mystery coolant loss" which might be a slightly leaking head gasket. (How mysterious? Coolant disappears, no white smoke, no smell, no visible leaks, cooling system held pressure for 20 minutes with at most 0.1 PSI loss, not a drop under the car, no leak in the cabin, no oil in coolant, no coolant in oil, no overheating, no bubbles in coolant while running, otherwise car runs fine. Have not yet done compression tests, but doubt it will show anything.) We looked in the cylinders with the bore scope I already own, which just shows a cone parallel to the cable axis, so we couldn't get a good look at the cylinder walls, only the top of the piston. The plugs and cylinder tops all looked pretty similar, none had that "steam cleaned" look

 

Thanks. I was trying to avoid buying one since looking into engine cylinders isn't something I do very often.

Does fluid really accumulate in the cylinder if it is kept pressurized that long? I watched a bunch of videos by people who had the right cameras and the drops always just ran down the cylinder wall and then disappeared between the cylinder and piston.

In the meantime I put some UV dye into the coolant and drove it around for 20 minutes, turning the heater on and off. Which was brutal considering how hot it was today. I'm going to jack up the car later and look around with a UV flashlight, especially behind the motor. It didn't leak anywhere forward of the motor. Hopefully find some sign of a leak outside the motor. If not, the plugs come out and we look again. The bright green of the dye may be more visible than the blue of the usual coolant would have been. I checked the oil right after the drive and it didn't have any dye in it. Apparently Accords can leak coolant into the intake manifold, wouldn't that be fun.

 

The bore scope I have is made by Klein tools. It is meh. The main problem is that it has one size USB on its cord and a permanently clipped on adapter for another (mini and USB C I think, don't recall which is which). Anyway, my LG Android phone can only connect through the adapter, and that makes the connection flaky as a fresh croissant. It takes 3 hands to use it right, one of which is there to stabilize that adapter connection. My son's Android phone uses the other type of connector, so it skips the adapter, and the scope works reliably on his phone. The picture quality also leaves much to be desired.

On further consideration, I can think of a few applications for a bore scope that looks sideways beyond cylinder inspection, so maybe I will spring for an inexpensive one and see how it works.

I will have to look into that generic application. The Klein tools one is nothing special, and if I'm going to have more than one of these devices, it would be nice to only have to learn one app. I wonder how it sees a bore scope with both a forward and sideways camera? Maybe as two separate devices?

 

Or clamp the phone and cord securely to a scrap of 1x4 lumber with screws and various sorts of rubber padded washers and clamps. Come to think of it, I have a box of polycarbonate pieces about that size around here somewhere, and that material isn't too hard to drill and tap. It would certainly be nice to be able to hold and move the phone around with one hand and not have to worry about the cable connection failing. Maybe clamp the endoscope cable (the semirigid part) to the back, then loop it around and into the phone, with a couple more clamps. Yeah, that sound like a fun project.

 

I bought a Teslong dual lens bore scope from Amazon (links to there from here never work, enter B0CL4MJ6NK in their search field). Image on the 1 LED side view camera is good enough for what I need. Not sure if it would show surface issues with a cylinder wall but I could easily read small text with it, so finding a drop of coolant shouldn't be a problem. The side view camera is placed so that the camera is closest to the tip and the LED farthest, at about 1 cm from the tip. So the bore scope needs to be able to get around 1cm into a cylinder or the LED won't throw much light. Shouldn't be a problem except maybe at top dead center.

Also bought a pack of USB C adapters (Amazon, B0BWYG78FH), with a C to Micro adapter to fit my phone.

The good news - the camera works using their Xscope app. That is the only way to select the tip or side - there is no button on the box molded onto the cable that holds the illumination brightness control.

The bad news - the USB-C to USB micro adapter was completely nonfunctional. It didn't work with either the Klein or Teslong bore scopes. The phone didn't see the USB device at all. Pity because it seated very solidly in the micro port, no wobble at all. So I had to test the Teslong through the iffy Klein adapter.

I tried the UVC Camera app, and "rough" doesn't begin to describe it. The configuration lists around 10 fields, and the only "documentation" on the bore scopes is the resolution. Going to be some work getting that to function. On about the 3rd try it saw the Teslong just enough to complain that there were 3 USB devices, with the strange complaint that "there must be at least two" (that isn't verbatim). I was hoping it would see it as two cameras and give the option of selecting one. Maybe if I plug this into a linux box the OS will populate enough under /sys/module/uvcvideo to fill in those fields.

 

Used the Teslong bore scope to check for coolant leaking into the wife's Accord (with the radiator pressurized to 16 psi, which is its rating). I didn't save any pictures, but both the tiny 1 LED side camera and the front camera with more LEDs gave very nice high resolution images. No coolant was observed, thankfully. Rotating the scope is a little awkward as it is attached to the phone by a roll of cable, and getting a particular region into focus required moving the cable up and down and tilting it slightly. It could see some light ash on some valves, edge on. The one thing it really cannot do is look back up at the valves. Unless one was dramatically damaged, it would be hard to see if a valve was bent with this camera. There was a dense mesh of extremely fine diagonal scratches on the cylinder walls, like the intersection of evenly spaced forward tilted and reverse tilted partial spirals (perhaps 1/4 turn from the top of the piston to the top of the block). Maybe left over the original honing? No vertical scratches were noted. Whatever, the car runs fine.

Given the price, the overall performance of this bore scope was excellent.