DIY Automotive Smoke Machine | Test for Vacuum Leaks

I built the thing guys it's a super simple DIY smoke generator tester perfect for checking your vehicle for vacuum leaks exhaust leaks or just making your garage smell like burnt baby oil so I think I've got all of my parts laid out here on the workbench now when I was looking at building my own smoke generator or smoke tester I think one of the First videos that I saw was from Martin builds I'll link to his video up here he does a really good job explaining how to build one of these things he's really detailed about it it's a really good video go check it out and there's plenty of other ones out there so I'm definitely not taking it Taking any credit for this um they've all made it look simple enough so I just thought I'd give it a try and see just how simple it really is so I'm going to put you on like an overhead view and I can show you exactly everything that I've got laid out and we'll get to putting this thing together all right so here's everything that I got now just based on availability of parts I've had to kind of change this up just a little bit so I got this end cap and this is the clean out I think it is that'll glue in there and then this will be the cap and this will become the main body of my smoker so I'm going to go ahead and glue this up now this is ABS not PVC shouldn't really matter just make sure you get a glue that can be used the second All Purpose this is meant for uh ABS PVC CPVC whatever so I'm going to go ahead and uh lather this up make sure you do this in a well ventilated area because I will probably be high by the time this is ready to go because this stuff stinks and yeah I'm good yeah I should probably turn a should probably turn the fan on or something this stuff is potent don't mind me I'm just gonna get high here all right then just slide these together let that set up and then like I said I got the cap here screws on and that will be my main body close this thing up I'm done with that I don't need to Huff any more of that stuff all right so now um see let's go with let's get the holes drilled I got some different length quarter 20. let me change one of those bolts all right so I'm going to drill some quarter inch holes directly apart from each other and this is where the uh wire on the inside will connect to the wick and then where your DC lines from your battery will plug into and they'll actually come from the inside out so you'll have studs on the outside so let's get those holes drilled now you don't want to go too low with them because you're going to have fluid in here and I really want these to sit like above where the wick is going to be in there so I'm going to drill these right below that's going to get into the thread so I'm going to go right below the threads here and uh yeah just drill this quarter inch hole make sure your fingers on the way then we'll just come directly across the other side and you can use the little ribs here on this PVC or ABS pipe to get you located just come right across to this side there you go I have different size eyelets there too so like I said these are going to come from the inside out once I ready to put everything together the eyelets are for this mechanics wire I cut off I owned it out it's like 3 ohms 2.83 ohms it's probably four feet or so that'll wrap around the wick so for the wick just want to take this get it to where it fits down inside there it doesn't need to be that high I want it to be a lot lower so I'm going to trim it first of all I'm going to mark where the bend is just so I know about where to trim I really only need an inch down from there or so so we'll go ahead and Mark that off nothing really precise about this it's just you know big estimate trim off the excess and again this will then go down inside there just like that all right now we're going to do is we're going to wrap this wire now we need to keep some of the wire available to wrap around the the uh to go into the eyelet to go into the bolt so I'm just gonna leave some excess hanging off and then we're just going to wrap this thing up now you don't want your wire to touch each other each Loop doesn't want to touch otherwise it changes the the resistance of the wire it creates a short more of a short than just bare wire already is so we're just going to wrap this around here trying to keep the each individual loop from touching perfect foreign so the hardest part so far is just keeping these wires from these coils of wire from touching each other you want to try to keep them is to keep them apart so you have more resistance in The Wire so that the wire just gets hot and doesn't like burn up with that done you can slide the wick down inside I'm not worried about the wick like fraying or anything like that that's just going to help it absorb what it needs to run the bolt through the eyelet and through the hole and then that creates the studs on the outside where your uh leads where your wires will come off and go to your battery all right so with that done now we can do the other holes for your air line so you need an input from a compressor which is what this is for and then an output to the hose which will be your clear hose here going where the smoke will come out and go to whatever it is you're testing that's what the Barb is for now you could just use one of these and slide that over that I wanted to have a hose barb so but you can get a smaller one or get a larger hose that would fit over that instead but I will have to drill two different size holes for these because of that so on this one with the hose barb so these are two different sizes so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my quarter inch bit that I use to drill those holes just to get a pilot hole and then I'll get a uni bit to make the holes larger and then I'm going to make them just large enough that these will thread into the PVC so let's get those holes drilled now these are gonna have to be again like up here keep them high so they're not down in the fluid it'll come up high with them and we've got these holes drilled I'm going to drill them basically 90 out from where these two are here [Music] of course I will have to probably run the bit get the actual bit that fits in there because it is a tapered hole right now but let me uh get that foreign there you go foreign all right it's time to get a little creative here I need like a 9 16 bit to get the correct size hole to tap for that air fitting but my unit bit obviously the outside is going to be wider than the inside so I'm going to bring this in from the inside here then come in this side not like that because it's not going to work all right I'm going to step that down be right back like I said we're getting creative here okay now I still run the tap all the way through all right now I am going to go ahead and just throw on some some thread sealant probably not necessary but pretty good now we got it all together can now do my power line so I just got an old power cord here I'm just gonna hack the ends off of so this is an AC power cord so I know it'll be able to take the current flowing through here I care about it so I need a two more eyelets and plan for that okay foreign foreign cookies I've got a plug into a battery you can see maybe smoke coming off that means it's heating up let's throw some fluid in there oh yeah smell it burning let's see what happens so people have used you know baby oil uh glycerin uh stuff like that I'm gonna try using this uh smoke machine fluid so I'm going to pour this in here I want to make sure it gets up to the point where it's the wick is in it and I'm just going to soak the actual Wick a little bit let's see what happens so I've got my leads here I'm going to plug them into the battery on the truck see it's smoking foreign there we go so now I should be able to run an airline in here an airline out here and blow smoke out to test for vacuum leaks exhaust leaks whatever I might need to look for but yeah that's a and smoking now other fluids might work better like baby oil or or some other sort of oil might work better but I had this laying here in the garage from trying to get a smoke machine working but yeah that's uh that's smoking all right so after some experimentation here's what I found first I had to turn my compressor pressure way down I even had to bypass my hose reel because I have an inline water separator that when the pressure gets too low the spring opens and it drains so I couldn't use it I had to bypass it because I had to go that low on the pressure second thing I found was that liquid for smoke machines no good I think maybe the burn Point might be a little too high and doesn't get hot enough that coil so it doesn't smoke enough I think part of that is because of the air coming across the coil with the compressor running so I ended up replacing the fluid with some regular baby oil and there's smoke I mean that pressure is it's barely blown anything but the smoke coming out of there there you go so I can put that into a tailpipe and I can tape off my exhaust and I can look for exhaust leaks I can also use this to find vacuum leaks and around the engine and as a bonus like Martin build says the garage smells so much better using baby oil appreciate you guys for watching hit that subscribe hit the Bell I'll catch you on the next one [Music] foreign

Channel: MoonBuilt Garage

Views: 35,213

Keywords: smoke machine, smoke tester, vacuum leak, vacuum leak test, vacuum leak tester, vacuum leak tester smoke, smoke test vacuum leak, diy smoke machine, how to make a smoke machine, how to make a smoke tester, smoke machine exhaust leak, exhaust leak test

Id: UPbb08xB2Ps

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 22 2023