PSA: OEM brand compression tester from Autozone

While talking about it in shout today, I figured I'd make a thread to let others know.

Autozone has a compression tester, the brand is OEM. Do not use this.



@SharksInSpace, @VoodooJef, and myself + @MS3brohanna all used different ones, from different autozones, across the country, around the same time. All 3 of us had part of the gauge get stuck in the head.

Luckily mine was easy to extract. I just had the hose come un-threaded from the extension. just needed a somewhat thin 19mm (iirc) socket to wrench out the extension. Except that isn't necessarily a socket I'd expect everyone to have on hand.

Shark didn't use the silver extension so when some part of the hose blew apart he had to rely on hopes, dreams, and needle nose pliers to get it out . Jef ended up having to pull the valve cover to take care of whatever broke on his. They can all chime in on their specific personal experience if they want.

Furthermore the gauge Brohanna and I used was like 30 psi off cal, so there's another reason to avoid it. But that's a story for another time.

If you need/want to do a compression test, I encourage you to avoid that gauge like 2 valve mustang owners.

 

I did not use the hex-headed extension, correct. So when mine got stuck in the first cylinder, it was the round bit attached to the end of the hose. In my attempts to free it, the hose eventually came entirely apart from the fitting, which proved to be a blessing -- it allowed me to jam some 11" needlenose pliers down, grip and crank the fuckin' thing loose from the head, to avoid having to pull the VC off.

I then figured, what the hey -- let's at least try to reassemble this thing so I can return it to vatozone without suspicion. So, I used some heavy pliers and a rubber mallet to jam the fitting back into the hose. I then decided double-what-the-hey, let's see if it still even works. Must have been a blockage somewhere in the line from my reassembly, because this is when the hose decided to burst a hole in its side at about 130psi. At least everything came back out of the head trouble-free, this time.

Vatozone did swap the kit for a second one, no questions asked, when I showed them the blown line, and I was ultimately able to successfully complete my compression test with results of 185-190 across the board. But, yeah...definitely some low quality shit, here, and I was panicking pretty hard when the fitting initially got stuck.