Who makes a decent cooling system pressure tester?

Stant.

about $85 US. Most good autoparts should have it.

Get the ADC Diagnostix 720 Series Monitor , much better than the Stant.

It just might save your life.

A blood pressure monitor? WTF I already know how sick I am!

Actually, that isn't a bad idea, if you can figure how to connect the hose from the aneroid sphygmomanometer to the overflow tank with an airtight seal/hose clamp thingy.

You've given me a good idea. I'll see if I can make such an adapter. My pressure cap is set for 16 psi, but I don't know what that translates into millimeters of mercury.

Lg

1 atm = 14.7 PSI = 30 in. Hg (not exactly but close enough for cocktail napkin calculations) and there's 25.4 mm in one inch. do da math...

nate

(at work and too lazy to whip out the calculator)

I thought about just wrapping the cuff thing around the hose.

That is not even a good joke. How much pressure would it take to collapse the hose. More than you could come up with...and if you could, the hose would be destroyed in the process.

I tried my aneroid and it has a slow leak. IOW, if I pump it up to a certain pressure, and turn off the intake/output air valve, it slowly loses pressure all by itself. Not quickly, but it is noticeable. I don't know where the leak is coming from either. Everything *looks* OK, but obviously isn't. Maybe I need to put grease on the hose fittings to seal them airtight, or it is a *valve* problem or something along those lines. I'll try the grease first.

Anyhow, not a bad idea.

BTW, you might trying using your blood pressure cuff to measure you fuel pressure from your fuel pump also ;-\ I mean it IS a gauge, isn't it ? Yes or No? You can use it to measure everything up to 300 millimeters of mercury. Which is what in PSI?

I get my info from the OBDII port on fuel pressure anyhow, along with a lot of other *stuff.*

Lg

Who's joking? Collapse what hose? What are you talking about? The blood pressure device does not measure pressure directly. No mainline into your vein and it does not crush your arm... =2E.. Well, at least not my arm. It measures the very slight expansion and contraction of a body part (via air pressure change in the cuff) due to changes =

in blood flow. For a radiator hose, all you would need would be a baseline when cold and a known pressure when hot. =

Btw: 16 psi is the equivalent of 827 mm Hg

OK, sorry, my mistake. I don't know about the conversion factor from psi to mm/Hg.

My sphygmo won't read that high anyhow. It was just an idea formed in the vacuum of not knowing the conversion factor from psi to mm/Hg.

I guess we go then with PLAN B!

What is Plan B? I dunno yet ;-) I really don't know, because I have no radiator cap per-se, except for that on my overflow tank, and I don't see what I can do with that without FUBARing it up.

Plan B............

At this point, were I in your situation, I would be heading over to a place like NAPA that sells automotive tools and parts. Call on the phone first to get prices and such. It seems my home-made idea isn't going to work. Just buy a pressure gauge with a pump handle attached to it. I know for a fact Actron sells one under their name for all sorts of measurements, but I don't know about the cap/fitting you would need to fit _your_ vehicle. That's the trick. You have to find something that fits yours. But FWIW, these things are pretty standardized.

Lg