I’ve talked before about using talc to find hydraulic and diesel fuel leaks--clean the leaky area with contact cleaner, get it completely and totally dry, then apply talc (like you use in a planter, or baby talc, or even cooking flour) to the suspected area. Run the machine, operate the hydraulics, and even a teeny little leak will show up as discoloration in the white powder.
Applying talc has always been an inelegant task. I’d take a palmful of powder and flip it at the targeted area. I usually got talc all over me and the machine, and occasionally on the spot I actually wanted to hit. Last week I decided to figure out a more refined way to apply the powder.
I took an empty plastic one-quart gear oil bottle, the kind with the tapered top. I cleaned it out with cleaning solvent, rinsed it out with contact cleaner, then blew out any residual moisture with an air hose. I filled the super-dry bottle with talc, and screwed back on the tapered top with the tip cut off. I can now point the tapered top at the exact spot I want to powder, squeeze the bottle and get a nice “poof” of talc to coat relatively small areas.
My new “poof bottle” was especially handy when I had to find a leak somewhere in a snarl of injector lines. I could poof powder on the backside of the lines, and up on the bottom of the injector pump in a fairly precise manner. Much better than throwing handfuls of powder all over the side of the engine.
