Spark plugs at 53k

[Hurricayne]

Hey yall. Make sure to check your spark plugs. 53k miles original plugs (bought it used) and they are burnt up bad. Picture upload is trash, but you get the idea.

Replaced with autolite iridium xp (xp5863) . They work great!

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[airline tech]

They actually look normal, if you are referring to the brown stain - that is normal corona stain.

 

[Grumpaw]

They don't look bad at all for 53 thousand....and no rust from the dreaded leaky water !!!!!

 

[Hurricayne]

corona stain.

good to know - I havent seen that on the last 4 or 5 cars that I replaced plugs on - guess i replaced them too early haha -
Cons of buying used cars - its hard to know the age of almost anything (fluids, plugs, etc). The service history through the app and the car fax are both very vague, so I've been erring on the side of caution. So far, I've done both diffs, the transfer case, added a MBS dipstick, extracted and replaced 5 qts of ATF, spark plugs, and an oil change. I plan to do the ATF pan upgrade after the winter

 

[RangerBill]

Hey yall. Make sure to check your spark plugs. 53k miles original plugs (bought it used) and they are burnt up bad. Picture upload is trash, but you get the idea.

Replaced with autolite iridium xp (xp5863) . They work great!

They look good to me. What makes you think that they are trash?

 

[Hurricayne]

They look good to me. What makes you think that they are trash?

I was getting some hesitation when trying to add some throttle. Not very responsive. At fist i suspected the transmission, reset the adaptive tables and it was still there. Replaced the plugs and that hesitation seems to have gone bye bye.

I still need to drive it more, but so far it was worth $40

 

[Rp930]

I was getting some hesitation when trying to add some throttle. Not very responsive. At fist i suspected the transmission, reset the adaptive tables and it was still there. Replaced the plugs and that hesitation seems to have gone bye bye.

I still need to drive it more, but so far it was worth $40

Same symptoms here. Mine were bad at 25k. Runs great now

 

[ctechbob]

I have plugs and DPFE sensor on a 30k rotation for mine. I just replace them and don't think about it for another 30k.

 

[got3fords]

Would like to see close ups of the tips, as others have said, they don't look bad. Thinking of doing mine at 60 or 65k.

 

[FM AZ]

36,000 miles. Same as Hurricayne, just wanted to see what I bought. “Corona stains’” good to know, I though it was excessive heat.

 

[theprinceofsnj]

Mine have never been out. But then again, I do drive like a senior citizen. Oh, that's right. I am a senior citizen.

 

[Colo_Ranger]

These were mine at ~50,000 miles.

 

[harringtondav]

None of the pics above show bad plugs as I know them. Good insulator color.
I don't have feeler gage eyes, but the gap looks like they may exceed .032" spec.
As long as you've gone to the trouble to remove them, replace them. ....cheap in the big picture, or tap the ground/side electrode on a wood bench to get the gap in spec. My OM states change at 100K miles. Remembering higher mileage past cars I've owned, I changed them around 70K miles. They looked OK, but the gap had grown.

Related story: I have a POS brother in law who does zero vehicle maintenance. My wife's sister visited us complaining her car was running poorly. It was. I pulled the plugs and the positive electrode had eroded flush with the insulator. I changed the plugs for her and it still ran poorly. A new coil six pack cured it. Apparently the huge gap stressed and ruined the coil.

 

[dtech]

[QUOTE="harringtondav, post: 721795, member: 4102"
Related story: I have a POS brother in law who does zero vehicle maintenance. My wife's sister visited us complaining her car was running poorly. It was. I pulled the plugs and the positive electrode had eroded flush with the insulator. I changed the plugs for her and it still ran poorly. A new coil six pack cured it. Apparently the huge gap stressed and ruined the coil.
[/QUOTE]

Very timely post entering into the holidays - when many of us will have to put up with relatives. Usually a larger spark gap won't take the coils out - the primary windings are fed a pulse of fixed voltage (12v or in some ignition systems higher) which induces high voltage in the secondary windings and creates the spark, if the gap is too wide to create the spark (flame) misses occur usually at higher engine loads, colder temps, or should there be a path of lesser resistance than the spark plug gap the high voltage will instead take that path.

 

[harringtondav]

Well, the coil was junk and a replacement fixed the issue. ...maybe unrelated to the worn out spark plugs.
My theory was from the old days of breaker point ignitions where new points were a part of a regular tune up. I used a dwell meter to set the point gap (dwell)while cranking the ignition and adjusting the points. A single coil fed the distributor.
A must-do instruction was to ground the high tension wire from the coil to avoid coil failure.
It wasn't spelled out, but I reckoned the secondary windings dumping to nowhere was bad. So I assumed a spark jump of over 3/32" -.090" was getting close to nowhere.
The Caravan had over 200K on it with original plugs. The coil may have died of old age at the same time.

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