Tag DIY automotive

hiy folks Ed here welcome back to Bullnose Garage. Today I’m doing something a little bit different. I have a product here from Dinox and a set of headers for my 351W. So, uh, they sent this set to me and, uh, asked me to do a little review of them for you guys, so that’s what I’m doing today. Um, now unfortunately I’m not going to have time, uh, to put those on the actual, uh, vehicle itself. I can’t get them on the engine, obviously the engine’s not ready for that. Uh, but what I can do is, uh, go through the package, open it up, take a look at them, see their quality, and let you know what I think. So let’s get into it. Hello!

All right, so here the box I got. We’re starting fresh. Everything is even still in the bubble wrap. So let’s take a look at these bad boys. These are stainless steel. They look really good. They come with brackets, reducers, your gaskets, and your hardware, and there you go. What you see is what you get. Now when I put these on mine, which I will, um, I think I’d probably go with ARP bolts instead of the ones that come with this. That’s not to say that these bolts aren’t good. I don’t know that they’re not good, but ARP is kind of the standard, and, uh, since I build a performance engine, I want to make sure that I get the best. So, uh, that’s what I’ll probably do there. But let’s take a look at these actual headers themselves. Oh man, I love new engine parts!

All right, so I will be the first to admit that I am not a header expert. I’m just some with a bullnose who likes working on in a spare time. But I can’t tell you when I think something is pretty high quality, and these seem to be pretty high quality. They are 304 stainless steel, and I mean this look shiny. I mean, yeah, they are beautiful. I can’t wait to get these on my 351 when I finally do that build. All right, so what do you get? You get a couple of headers, obviously, get a couple of reducers. Uh, this will take you from 3 in down to 2 and 1/2 if that’s the size of your exhaust. Obviously, you get the gaskets, and you get a couple of hangers, and you get your mounting hardware.

Okay, so let’s take a look at some of the important stuff, right? Obviously, like I said, they seem to be pretty well built. They’re nice and solid. Um, the runners on there look like they’re configured pretty well. Here’s the welds, so you can see what the welds look like. Um, I am not a welding expert by any means, but they do look pretty good to me. There’s your welds on top, and just for the sake of consistency, so that you can see how their manufacturing processes are for two separate pieces, here’s the other one, right? So I know how heavy these are ’cause I’m holding on to them, but how thick are they? On the tin, it says they should be 1.5 mm. I got my CID Harbor Freight caliper, and let’s see what it says. Oh, it’s not pull the battery out of there. Handy dandy Harbor Freight quality right there. Let’s get that back. Come on now, get on there. Hey, there we go. Battery compartment in there. All right, is zero. Okay, now we’re ready. Let’s see how thick it is, and it says 1.52 and 1.47 depending on how I roll it. Uh, obviously because it’s rounded, it’s kind of hard to get an exact measurement, but you know, I do think, uh, let’s see, there’s 1.6, 1.51. Yeah, I think that’s going to be, uh, exactly what they say it is, 1.5 mm.

So for the sake of complete transparency, there is one thing that I want to mention. The company Dinox that sent me these, again, they sent me these for free for me to keep them, put them on my truck. Uh, they’re not paying me for this, so, um, they are a little expensive. These are about, uh, $3.89 for the set on their website. Uh, now they have said that, uh, they’ll make a deal for my viewers. It’ll be down in the comments. Um, but, uh, they do come with a three-year warranty from Dinox. Um, now again, to be fair, I don’t know how, uh, good that warranty is going to be. I haven’t had to deal with their customer service. I have dealt with them as part of this, uh, this video preparation for them to send me these headers, uh, and they’ve been very responsive. They’ve gotten back to me within, uh, you know, 24 hours every single time. Now obviously they’re trying to get me to make a video to do release or to do a review for you guys, so you know, they’re trying to grow their business, they’re trying to reach out. You know, the other thing I’ve done noticed is that, uh, they’ve been posting a lot on like 4×4 forums and, uh, you know, other automotive forums trying to get their brand out there. Uh, so what they mainly make is, uh, exhaust stuff. They kind of specialize in EGR delete stuff, um, tubes and fittings and stuff to do those sorts of projects. So, you know, if you’re looking to do an EGR delete or, um, you know, they got a couple videos out there about, uh, um, exhaust dumps, electronic exhaust dumps, and, um, just a bunch of stuff it comes with exhaust. So if you’re looking into that, you may want to give them a shout. But they’re fairly new, so, uh, you know, if you’re willing to, they gave me a chance, small channel trying to get out there and, uh, you know, promote their products, and so I really do appreciate that. And like I said, I will definitely be putting this, uh, on my truck when, uh, when that time comes, uh, when I get that engine ready to go. So I’m looking forward to that.

And you know, as much as I’m not a mechanic, I am kind of a perfectionist, so I’ve been doing a lot of research on basically every part that’s going to go on that engine. And I wouldn’t put a part on the engine, uh, that I don’t trust, you know, and that’s just the way that it is. And even with my limited experience in headers and parts and that kind of stuff, man, these are, you know, these are heavy. Uh, they feel like they’re really well built, uh, and it just, it just they look beautiful. So, you know, take that for what it’s worth, take it with a grain of salt from me because again, I’m not a mechanic, I’m just a Schmo. All right? And I got these for free, but I will tell you that they’re not paying me, so, uh, the fact that I got them for free has not tainted this review or anything. It is just a straight honest, um, you know, what you see is what you get with me, guys. Uh, you know, we’ll see how they go. It’s like the bolts, right? I’m going to use ARP ’cause, yeah, anyway, yeah. So when we put these on my truck, uh, you know, when I want to put them on the engine ’cause I’m going to run on a stand, uh, we’ll see how it goes.

So anyway, as always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, put them below. Uh, I’ll have links below to all of this stuff and the Dinox website, uh, for more information. Thanks again for watching, guys, and we will see you next time.

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage, and today I’m with the donor. It’s been a long time since I’ve been out here looking at this thing. It has been sitting out on my lot for about three years, just sitting here under the sun.

Now when we left off, I had fogged the engine. If you don’t know what that means, it means there’s an oil that you put inside called a fogging oil. You put that down inside all the cylinders, run it around a few times, and make sure that it coats the cylinder walls real well. And you do that to make sure that no rust or corrosion gets in there if the engine is going to sit for a while.

Well, this thing has sat for three years, and today I’m going to open it up and I’m going to see exactly what kind of damage has been done in that three years with fogging oil applied to the engine. And to help me with that, I’ve got this brand new endoscope from Vivor. Now to be fair, they sent that to me. They asked me to do a review on it, and I figured what better way to do a review on an endoscope than to get back down inside this engine and see what kind of damage has been done. So we’re going to do that today. Stick around.

So before we get into this, let me tell you a little bit about this Boriscope camera from Vivor, because that’s one of the reasons I’m here. They sent this to me for free in return for a review of it. And so, you know, it’s far beyond me to refuse free stuff. So I’m going to go ahead and give you guys my honest opinion of this, and it’s actually really good, guys.

So last time I did this project, I used a computer laptop with a Boriscope that was like a USB plug, and it goes in, and I was balancing the laptop on top of the engine and trying to get video and doing all this stuff. This thing has all that built in. There’s an SD card in there. It takes video and pictures. The screen is right there. This just plugs right in. It’s USB charged. It’s really great, and one of the things I really like about it is it’s got three cameras on it. So there’s a camera on this end and a camera on this end and over here. So side to side, right? You get a camera both all three ways, and that’s really going to help me out going inside of here.

So this is actually the cheapest one that they make. On Vivor, it’s like 60 bucks. Use the link in my description to get 5% off, and yeah, you know, I have used endoscopes with my phone, right? So I’ve got a Samsung phone that I use for videoing right now, and those are always kind of rough because you got to get the right software, the right app, and they’re, you know, they’re all different kind. I’ve got two or three of them in the garage. They’re all different kind of apps that you got to use with them, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. This is really plug and play. You know, I can’t say enough good things about it for 60 bucks. It really is worth the time to check it out.

So, you know, I’ll get into it. I’ll take some video with it. You can see the quality of the video, and we’ll get in and take a look at it. So, all right, enough about this. Let’s take a look inside these cylinders. I am super interested to see what it looks like in there.

So one quick thing about this, guys, is I’ve already got a video on how to fog an engine. I can’t really get into any more detail than that video gives. It’s really, really simple to do. You just need some fogging oil and a spark plug wrench, and that video goes into how to do it. So, you know, go ahead and check that video out if you need to figure out how to do this. Since I already have a video about it, I’m not going to get into it. I’m just going to open this up and take a look.

Spark plugs are still wet. Hopefully that’s oil. Oh, it smells like oil. All right, all the spark plugs are out. Now is the moment of truth. Let’s take a look.

All right, so we’re going to fire up my V-bore endoscope here. Oh, we’re upside down. That’s because of this thing here. There we go. Yeah, you can kind of see it. And we’ll get down inside. I’ll start the recording, and we’ll see what it looks like.

Okay, it’s recording. Hello. Oh, hello. All right, we got to turn the light on. Hello, light. There it is. Okay, now let’s take a look down inside of here. Oh, that cylinder looks like it’s pretty much up top. Yeah, you can kind of see where I scraped on there. It looks pretty wet in there still. It’s hard to tell cylinder number two or the second one. Oh, look at that. Yeah, so you can see those cylinder walls are in pretty good shape still in there.

Let’s flip this to a side view, and you can clearly see the crosshatch on that cylinder wall. And there’s the other side. Oh, wow. With that side view, you can even see inside the valves. That is cool, man. I didn’t expect to see that. That’s neat. Man, those cylinder walls look good, don’t they? And then back down. All right, let’s try the next one.

Oh, yeah, it looks pretty good. Oh, look at that. Okay, can you see there’s a valve top up there? Let’s go to the other side. Yep, you almost got it. There we go. See, there are lights on the side of this and the front. Dude, guys, you know, they’re not paying me for this. They really aren’t. For 60 bucks, this thing is really cool. I didn’t expect to be able to see the valves like this in here. That’s great.

And next. Yeah, cylinder looks pretty good. Piston head looks pretty good. Cylinder walls look nice and clean. There’s my valves. One of them, anyway. Now, I don’t know enough to know which one’s intake and which one’s exhaust, so sorry about that, guys. I keep saying it. I’m not an expert. So, it’s a little bit tricky to maneuver, and it’s kind of hard to see to know what you’re looking at sometimes with this.

All right, there’s one side. We’ll go check the other one. Yeah, there’s actually still a little bit of oil sitting down there. I don’t think that’s corrosion. I think that’s just a layer of oil that’s kind of, it’s old, right? It’s been here for three years, so it’s going to be a little gunky.

Oh, look at that. So, so far, my only real gripe about this camera is that it’s kind of hard to get a feel for which buttons change to which direction. Oh, this one’s close to the top. That’s what’s going on there. So, this flips back and forth, and this button flips front and side, and it’s kind of not super intuitive because they’re just arrow buttons. But other than that, in terms of like quality, oh, that’s right on top of there. In terms of quality and what it can do, that’s pretty impressive, and I got to say that it looks to me like the cylinder walls in this thing are just gorgeous. Look at that. I mean, this engine has been sitting out here in the New Mexico sun uncovered for three years. Pretty impressive.

All right, guys, now for the real test. 15 sixteenths on a breaker bar. Let’s see if this puppy will turn. Oh, yeah, that’s nice and smooth. That sure got a ratchet. Come on, get in there, you. There we go. Oh, well, the engine is smooth. The pulley’s out here, not so much. But, yeah, that moves nice.

All right, guys, there you go. I feel like I accomplished a couple of really great objectives with this video. First of all, I verified that this engine still turns three years later, and I confirmed that fogging an engine is a great way to make sure that it stays in tip-top shape while it’s in storage. And secondly, I confirmed my contractual obligation to VIVAR, so I get to keep this cool piece of kit.

Guys, this thing is awesome. I’m telling you, you see the video, right? It’s amazing what this thing can do. I love the camera on either side. That is so handy. This little handheld dealie that I have to go out and get my phone or hook up to a laptop or whatever. Guys, I’m being serious. These guys aren’t paying me. They’re not, right? But they reached out to me and said, you know, hey, Ed, would you like to do a review on this? We’re looking for some YouTubers to do some reviews on our products. And so I went through the stuff to become part of their program. And man, they’ve been really great. And this thing is cool. I should’ve got a long time ago. And I’m being serious. I’m not even, you know, I’m not doing the whole YouTube sponsored content, blah, blah stuff. I’m being serious.

Guys, I’m gonna be honest with you, transparent no matter what happens. This thing’s worth your time. If you need to look inside of engines or get down, I’ve used, not this one, but I’ve used endoscopes like this to verify whether or not my exhaust bolts are broken on my other truck. I used to get down into drain pipes in the house. This stuff, you need to have one of these laying around. If you don’t have one already, you’re gonna use it. There’s gonna be times where you don’t have another choice. This thing’s gonna save your butt to get into those places where you can’t see. I’ve used it to diagnose blockages in my air conditioning system inside the house, right? So these things are a lifesaver. And this one in particular for 60 bucks, I mean, you’re gonna pay 20, 25, 30 for one of the phone ones connected. And this is so much more convenient. It’s got cameras on the side.

I am sure that I am rambling on and I don’t really need to because you guys are gonna think I’m a shill and I’m not trying to be. I really am just that impressed. Okay. So again, fog your engines, guys. If you’re gonna leave them sitting out in the weather, again, three years, no tarp, New Mexico sun. Brutal. Guys, it’s brutal sitting out here like this. I tell you, it’s brutal.

All right. You guys gotta fog your engines. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, wanna call me a sellout, comment below. Thanks again for watching. And we will see you next time.