Here I have two tools from Innovative Products of America.  The first one deals with brakes.  Many times you wind up where your car pulls one way or the other when you apply the brakes, and that can be tough to diagnose unless you have the right tools.

Well, here we have the right tools; this is a pair of brake pressure gauges.  These are very inexpensive and they do a great job.  Remove the brake pad or brake pads from one side of the car and take one of these tools and put it on the outside, or you can use both of them.

Put one on the outside and one on the inside and then somebody inside the car applies the brake.  This registers the brake pressure right on the gauge, and that tells you how much pressure there is being exerted by this caliper. And if you’re using both on the same caliper it will tell you if the pressure is equal on the outside and the inside.  Or you take your readings on one side and then repeat it on the other side to see if they’re the same.  These are available for under a $100, so that price makes this kind of testing very practical.

One other thing that you may come across: maybe you’re replacing a broken timing belt or you’re installing a cam shaft or who knows what?  There are lots of things that you do on automobiles that require the number one piston to be at top dead center, and top dead center is when the piston can’t move any higher in the cylinder. No matter what you do it will only go down, that’s top dead center.

Sometimes timing marks are hard to find; they’re inaccurate or something like that. So here’s something that takes all of the guess work out of it.

Here we’ve taken the cylinder head off of this engine, we’ve removed one of the spark plugs, and we have installed this tool.  One portion goes down against the piston, and as the piston comes up it pushes the rod up on the outside.  When it reaches a point that no matter how you turn the crankshaft with a wrench it does nothing but go down, then that is top-dead center.

It comes with several different adaptors for different types of spark plugs and different types of cylinder heads, and it even has a whistle to determine top-dead center on the compression stroke, taking all the guess work out of it. 



If you have a question or comment, write to me.
The address is MotorWeek, Owings Mills, MD, 21117.