Cars, etc.

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

Don't think I'd consider myself a huge SHO fan at the moment.

Got home today after just driving all over the place with the sunroof open and decided I'd had just about enough of it acting like it's only running on 4 cylinders, and besides, I'd had my son pick up a set of plugs for me the other day while he was in town.

Have you ever serviced the rear plugs in one of these?

I took out the front 3. No biggie except that I noticed they were all in a bit of an oil bath. Otherwise, they looked to have been burning just fine.

Decided to start the car on the back 3 to blow the oil out of the cylinders and it started. Barely. Sounded like exactly one cylinder. Wouldn't pick up revs or anything.

So, off comes the intake assembly. Not fun but I've seen worse. What sucks is that it looks like you're *not* gonna change the rear plugs with that thing in the way.

When I got everything out of the way and went to remove the rear plugs, I found that 2 of them were in an even deeper pool of oil than any of the front ones.

There was so much oil that by the time I got the plugs out, they were too wet to really tell their condition.

I inspected the front plugs wires and they looked just fine. Figured I'd put an ohm-meter on them later. But then I looked at the back ones. All of them had huge cracks on the part that goes around the plug.

"Hmmmm....", I thought. With cracks like that, in a 3" deep pool of oil, perhaps these plugs aren't even firing at all and, instead, the current is just going through the oil to the head.

So, I'm off to town to pick up valve cover gaskets, plug wires (looks like I'd better bring lube for these), intake gaskets, and yet another set of allen wrenches since that's what I need for the valve covers and yet again I can't find any of the sets I've bought.

With any luck I'll have her rolling again tonight or tomorrow and hopefully consistently on 6 cylinders.

Edit: Appears the AC doesn't work either. Discovering that reminded me of how the guy who sold me the car turned on the AC and bragged about how excellent it was working, throwing out such cold air. And my reminding him that it was below 20 outside.