Building a DIY Pressure Tester

[Sporkboy]

AKA How to burn a $50 Amazon Gift Card

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I finally broke down and built a pressure tester. OK, built may be a little strong as it only has an off the shelf housing, 2 adapters, a pressure gauge and a valve. Everything was purchased from Amazon, but you may be able to save some money on the parts that aren’t the filter housing if have a Home Depot nearby.I had Teflon tape, wire for a holder, wrenches and an old bike pump so this was well under $50.

A cheap AliExpress pressure tester would be about $100, so I figured this would be a good route to go.

I am glad that I did this as the thing works well. I have found that my stainless MK1 that is rated at 30m passed a 90m test! I had expected that the actual water resistance of this watch was more than 30m, but I didn’t expect it to be 3x the listed rating. 9bar/9atm/90m is where my bike pump tops out, but this is fine for my needs

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I basically followed the instructions from an old WUS thread (https://www.watchuseek.com/threads/diy- ... 0.4319282/). If you have a compressor, then you can get a fitting for that instead. Read the original thread and you will see what I mean.

For my build I used the following parts:

Pentek 158110 3/8" #5 Slim Line Clear Filter Housing $21
Powermate Vx 032-0025RP Pressure Gauge $6

Milton (S-684-4) 1/4" MNPT Male Tank Valve $6.75

KOOTANS 4pcs Heavy Duty 3/8 NPT Male Thread to 1/4 NPT Female Thread Brass Reducer $10.75

Total $44.50

[recapt]

Amazing. Thanks for sharing, spork!

[AndroidIsAwesome]

Awesome, thanks for posting. Might give it a try building one myself.

[watchpalooza]

Thank you for providing another great example of the many ways this community helps one another, SO much more than just deals around here.

[Sporkboy]

Thank you for providing another great example of the many ways this community helps one another, SO much more than just deals around here.

You are very welcome. There is so much information out there so we have to share what we find that works very well in the hobby.

I am not sure about global availability of this pressure chamber, but there may be something available in Germany if you wanted to give this a try. I have had this for a couple of days and I am really enjoying having this new piece of kit at my disposal.

[cortman]

I'm building one too now. Thanks for sharing this [mention]Sporkboy[/mention] !!

[Sporkboy]

I'm building one too now. Thanks for sharing this @Sporkboy !!

I am glad to hear it. It is another one of those ‘nice to have’ tools that doesn’t make sense to purchase commercially when you can do something like this on the cheap. I hope that your experience is similar to mine and look forward to hearing how it goes.