After shooting my Lelya the other day I put a little silicone oil on my fill probe o-rings, rubbed it in to the o-rings, inserted the probe, aired up my Lelya some, and set her down expecting to go out the next morning. After I dressed and got ready to head out the next morning I checked the gauge on the reservoir and it was around 75 bar. The gauge never gets that low.
I double checked my log and saw that I had aired her up to around 175 bar the night before. I aired her up again to 185 bar and debated on whether I should take her out. I decided to go and didn’t have any issues with leaks. In fact it hasn’t leaked again since - today is the third day. I’m wondering what causes this sort of leak. Could it be a valve? It doesn’t appear to be a slow leak because I would have thought the reservoir would have lost the same amount of pressure by now. The gauge hasn’t moved much. Last I checked it’s at 180 bar and the 5 bar could have been me reading the gauge from an angle (I don’t like putting my face in front of the barrel). There are no 5 bar increment marks on the Wika gauge so if the needle looks to be in between two 10 bar marks I call it 5 bar.
I read about placing balloons over both ends of the reservoir to detect slow leaks where o-rings have degraded. I haven’t tried this. I’ve also seen a video of how a fill port leak behaves. It doesn’t seem to be a fill port issue. I’m just confused as to why this occurred so rapidly overnight on one occasion and nothing similar has occurred since. Any ideas? Could a little silicone on the fill probe o-rings be the culprit? I’d appreciate some help here. Thanks in advance for the assistance folks.
I double checked my log and saw that I had aired her up to around 175 bar the night before. I aired her up again to 185 bar and debated on whether I should take her out. I decided to go and didn’t have any issues with leaks. In fact it hasn’t leaked again since - today is the third day. I’m wondering what causes this sort of leak. Could it be a valve? It doesn’t appear to be a slow leak because I would have thought the reservoir would have lost the same amount of pressure by now. The gauge hasn’t moved much. Last I checked it’s at 180 bar and the 5 bar could have been me reading the gauge from an angle (I don’t like putting my face in front of the barrel). There are no 5 bar increment marks on the Wika gauge so if the needle looks to be in between two 10 bar marks I call it 5 bar.
I read about placing balloons over both ends of the reservoir to detect slow leaks where o-rings have degraded. I haven’t tried this. I’ve also seen a video of how a fill port leak behaves. It doesn’t seem to be a fill port issue. I’m just confused as to why this occurred so rapidly overnight on one occasion and nothing similar has occurred since. Any ideas? Could a little silicone on the fill probe o-rings be the culprit? I’d appreciate some help here. Thanks in advance for the assistance folks.
