DreadfullBetty
New Member
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Dec 04, 2016 12:36 am
First Name: Beth
Location: Ottawa Canada

New life for an old gauge

Sat Feb 11, 2017 10:13 pm

About a 5 weeks ago I slipped on the ice and fell tearing the tendons in my left rotator cuff. My Dr says that my ski season is over and not to do anything stupid that will damage my shoulder further.
So to keep myself amused I've been working on bringing some of my gear back into workable condition.
This evening it was an old U.S.Divers depth gauge. You know the one it's a great honking wrist mount with a lovely glow. Mine had begun leaking oil and had a large bubble. When I took it apart the cause of the leak was the rubber cup inside the aluminium case had gotten hard and had a number of fine cracks :(
I've been thinking how to fix this for some time and was all set to cast the part in silicon to creat a mould and pour a new cup.
This seemed like a lot of work so what I've done instead is take the gauge appart and put all the parts in a large bowl of mineral oil. Next I took an internal condom took the ring out of the end and filled it with oil and sunk it in the bowl. For those of you not in the know an internal condom is used by the lady it's sort of like a large polyurethane sock with a ring on either end that you stuff in your lady bits. I'll leave you to ponder out the rest of how it works.
With the condom filled with oil I stuffed the rubber cup down to the bottom and then cut off the excess Polyurethane leaving about half an inch to spare. I worked the bubbles out and tucked the extra half inch inside the rubber cup. Keeping everything beneath the surface of the oil I reinstalled the gauge face and glass and then carefully slud the rubber cup back into the aluminium housing. The outer ring screwed back on without an issue.
The gauge has been cleaned and dried and os hanging to show any leaks. I'll bring it to the pool for a test next week.
This isn't my primary gauge it's just a fun older peice, I'm curious to see how it responds to the fix :)

DB

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