Taking pictures of a cylinder without removing the head?

Hi. I remember seeing an ad about a year ago for an inexpensive fiber
optic type gadget that allowed you to take pictures of inaccessible
places. For example, they showed a picture of one being lowered
through a spark plug hole to take digital pictures of the inside of an
engine cylinder. I don't remember where I saw this and, of course,
can't find anything about it now.

Has anyone seen something like this?

I was thinking an alternative would be to lower a super bright LED into
the cylinder for light. Then use a small digital pen camera with the
tiny lens and try taking pictures through the spark plug hole (moving
the light wires off to the side). If nobody knows anything about the
above mentioned camera, I'll give this a try and report back how it
works.

My objective here is to see if there's any piston head damage on a
snowblower. The engine was run very lean and hot so I want to check
for piston damage. The guy ran it so hot that the muffler was glowing
red! Since this is someone else's snowblower, I would rather not take
the covers and head off.

Thanks!

That's a bore scope and available in a good tool store or industry
supplier.
It's great to see what's going on in engine cylinder and you can take a look
at valve side and check about deposits on borings.

Regards,

Ralf
--
www.omnibusclub.de

On Sat, 05 Feb 2005 23:10:39 +0100, Ralf Ballis >
wrote:

>That's a bore scope and available in a good tool store or industry
>supplier.
>It's great to see what's going on in engine cylinder and you can take a look
>at valve side and check about deposits on borings.
>
>Regards,
>
>Ralf

Sure, and look at the Price for this little gizmo.
http://tinyurl.com/4p3yk

This is to look into 1 cylinder? I think that costs more than the
snowthrower ;-) For a 1 cylinder engine, I would just pull the head
off. That is a 5 minute job. Then cut a gasket and re-assemble.
That is 15 minutes.

Lg

If it's one of those little 2 stroke numbers, you can sometimes get a
look at the side of the piston by simply removing the intake (if it's
equipped with reeds) or the muffler & looking in the port.