Haynes' World is a regular feature that reveals what the staff at Haynes are doing with their vehicles. This time, Rob’s been using his new borescope to examine the hidden parts of his BMW.
Car: BMW 2 Series
Owner: Rob Keenan
My car, like many other 'moderns', tells you not only when the brake pads need to be changed but how many miles you have left before, presumably, metal gets friendly with metal. The iDrive menu is claiming that there are 1,400 miles left to go before my front pads need to be replaced.
That's all well and good, but I like to do my own research before I splash out on new car parts, to make sure they really do need to be fitted.
Normally, that would necessitate removing a wheel and taking a close look, but I bought a new bit of kit a while back that I hoped would save me having to do that.
Borescope vs endoscope
Contrary to what you see above, I bought a borescope, not an endoscope. The latter is inserted into certain human orifices for medical examinations. The former is designed for mechanical observations, and this is what I wanted. Not a colonoscopy. And yet, confusingly, most of the borescopes you'll find for sale are marketed as endoscopes. It doesn't take long to figure out that they're designed for examining engine parts and the like, though.
They tend to be sold in two formats. The first is a length of semi-flexible cable with a tiny borescope camera surrounded by LED lights at one end and a USB socket at the other, which plugs into your phone. The second includes all of the above but swaps the USB socket for a handheld monitor, usually with a few controls that give you an optical zoom, let you adjust the LED intensity and so on.
Borescope for iPhone
Initially, I researched the first format, because it tends to be cheaper, takes up less room in the toolbox and the idea of using my iPhone to control it made perfect sense. However, the more I researched them, the more reviews I found that suggested the apps you use with a phone borescope are flaky. Others mentioned USB issues, where Lightning-USB-C converters didn't work as intended. Basically, a heap of potential trouble.
I then realised that you didn't have to pay much more money to get the monitor type of borescope, so I bit the bullet, handed over my £28.49 and hoped for the best.
You can pay big bucks for the best borescope, so £28 is an embarrassingly low amount, but as I say, I'd done my research and hoped that at least some of the reviews were genuine.
It was well packaged and the rechargeable battery had enough juice to be used out of the box, so I had a go with the controls, which were simple enough. One thing was very obvious, which is that it definitely doesn't have the billed 1080P display – but then I already knew what to expect thanks to those reviews – think first-gen colour-screen candybar phone, circa late nineties. At least the LEDs seemed fit for purpose, and as well as being able to zoom in, you could switch the image to black and white, as well as rotate it.
Borescope inspection
So how did it perform in a real test? Surprisingly well, although it took a while to get used to its foibles. Although the cable is flexible, I wonder just how many times it can be adjusted before something inside snaps – and when that happens the whole thing will have to be binned. So I was wary about adjusting it too much.
Also, it's very tricky to work out which way is up once you've inserted the camera somewhere, but the hardest thing to master is the focusing; the camera needs to be around 5cm away from an object for it to be seen clearly.
Once I'd got used to all of that, I could see that there was a still a good chunk of material left on the brake pads (seen in the image below), but I'll check again when I get a 'bong' from the car, telling me that it's time to replace them.
