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What are you using for a couplant. If its not a thick gel you may have air pockets. I bought some from Grainger.
http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/wwg/search.shtml?op=search&N=14719&in_dim_search=1

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True to a point but a person can use anything from snow,plain water,vaseline or ultragel. The thicker gel is mostly for higher temp surfaces and when you need the gel to stay where you put it (like overhead work)

The problem with these cheap sonic checkers is that they dont have all the options that a more expensive checker has. For instance, they may only have a couple different options for transducers where as a more expensive unit will have a few dozen options including different frequencies and sizes/profiles. More expensive units will also allow you to use a plastic shoe that goes onto the end of the transducer that you can get in different curvitures. Also to answer your question about finding a different transducer it depends what cable you have. Can you unscrew the transducer from the cable or is the cable and transducer one unit? If its one unit you likely wont beable to buy just any transducer and make it work. Panametrics and krautkramer use different cable types and wont interchance.

Also I'm not sure how those chinese meters work as far as calibrating them but you will want to do a high and a low. for example if you are expecting the material to be between .250" and .400" thick make sure you cal. the machine from .500" high and .100" low. A step wedge made of the same material works best for this but also costs quite a bit unless you can make your own. I have seen machines that have issues where they cal. on the high and low perfect but when you check thickness's inbetween the high and low they are WAY off.

Anyways these are just some tips and advice that may be useful to some.

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The unit I have has 2 transducers - the smaller transducer has about a 7 mm surface (8 mm if you go outside diameter) and it was flat when I got it. I sanded it down and now it's round, but lost the accuracy when I did that.

Unit still calibrates fine and measures fine with the other (larger) transducer, but I think I need a new transducer (preferably smaller and curved) for cylinder walls. Cables are push-in with a spring loaded type of disconnect as seen below. Any tips on where to look for one?





Thanks

Scott

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Scott the male ends on your transducer cable look to be the same setup that they use with a panametrics DL-36 and DL-37. What frequency are your transducers? It should say on the top of the transducer in "Mhz" It most likely will be a 5.0 or a 2.25.

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Here's a link to a place that sells transducers etc. You might want to email them or give them a call and see if they have what you need. Also I cant tell by the pictures you posted but are you able to push the rubber boot up by the transducer and unscrew the cables from it?

http://www.ndtsystems.com/Transducers/transducers.html

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I have the same setup, and to make it easier to check cylinders I ground and filed a radius into business end of the probe. Did not use anything specific, just did it by eye and feel, but it did help noticeably.

Unfortunately when you do that it is no good for flat surfaces anymore, but that is also true of some other brands of testers/probes

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Here's a link to a place that sells transducers etc. You might want to email them or give them a call and see if they have what you need. Also I cant tell by the pictures you posted but are you able to push the rubber boot up by the transducer and unscrew the cables from it?

http://www.ndtsystems.com/Transducers/transducers.html

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