Celica down. Champion plugs suck, Help me figure out my next move Options

[enderswift]

Hey 6gc,

I would like your opinion on how to go about taking care of the trouble a champion plug has unleashed on my #4 cylinder. BTW i have a 99 5s. Here's the story:

I was driving back home from the gas station a little while ago when I heard a pop followed by a thhack thhack thhack that matched my revs. I killed the engine and pulled over right away. When i popped the hood i saw that my spark wire was sticking out of the valve cover. my first instinct was that the threads in the head broke and that my spark shot out. When i looked in there however it was still screwed in. So i assumed it had simply gotten loose and was letting some of the compression escape, thus pushing the wire out. From there i decided to limp the whole 3 block back home when the thhack sound turned into a thhack rattle sound. I killed the engine again and this time decided to walk my ass home and get some tools.

Once i got the tools and got the sparkplug out, this is what I found:




The insulation surrounding the electrode completely disintegrated and is probably lying on top of my piston at the moment. Nothing like little bits of ceramic to score up your cylinder walls



im not sure if you can tell from the picture, but the whole tail end separated from the thread and is most likely the source of the original thhack sound I was hearing. Thats not rust by the way, thats caked on oil from the leaky seals i mentioned earlier.

My mistake was assuming it had only come loose, at which point the insulation probably shattered causing the complementary rattle. Good thing I shut the engine off. Im going to be optimistic and say the cylinder walls/rings/valves weren't damaged by this.

All that said, here's my dilemma as I can go about this several different ways:

1. start the car without the #4 the spark plug and try to get the shards to fly out of the hole (Im not a fan of this but I've see it done)

2. Take apart the whole top half of the engine and investigate/clean. ( I priced all the gaskets and head bolts to around $150 and I could probably get it done in ~ 4 hours. how do you guys feel about Felpro BTW?)

3. Rig up a vacuum attachment and try to clean things out that way, since a magnet obviously wont help and the opening is too small to use an oil soaked rag. When i say vacuum attachment, I'm thinking to taping a large diameter straw to the end of my vacuum and stuffing it into the cylinder to suck up the loose bits. Its a little hokey but the more I think about it the more I like it.

I can post pics of the vacuum if you guys are curious haha

This post has been edited by enderswift: Mar 20, 2010 - 8:30 PM

[enderswift]

well I'm exhausted. Its almost 4 am and I've spent the last ~6 hours cleaning out that cylinder. After some trial and error I found that pouring oil into the cylinder allowed me to suck up the porcelain relatively easily. What I did was pour in the oil, mix things up to suspend the shavings before sucking them out with the vac. I did this for hours using a total of 4 quarts of oil going about a tenth of a quart every time. The vacuum contraption worked out to be a combination of a clear bleeder line attached to a funnel together with a shop vac. It worked reasonable well and I was able to see my progress. After a while I couldn't get any more bits to flow through the hose no matter what I tried. Now before I go on I know all of this sounds halfass but it worked well and Im going to consider this as one of those creative engineering solutions my professors are always pining on about. Anyway, I replaced all four spark plugs with NGKs and started the car. After an initial cough it started up and fell to a smooth silent idle. To say I was ecstatic would be an understatement. A quick spin to check things out and burn off the oil from the combustion chamber seemed as ordinary as ever. I'm not going to get lulled into a false sense of security though, I'm going to do a compression test tomorrow morning to determine if I want to take the head off and rebuild it or not.

I'm just curious - why were Champion plugs installed instead of the OE NGK Laser Platinums (BKR6EP-11)?

When I originally installed those plugs I was a broke college freshman, even more so after the $3000 down payment for the celi. So I did as best a tune-up as i could afford and at the time the ngk's were waay too pricey (they were on sale today though ).So I choose the champions since I worked at advance auto and never had anyone come in saying they sucked. Plus they were better than anything else we had in stock (bosch, autolite, ect..)

you'd think, but no. a chunk of ceramic between the valve and valve seat can create a divet and then as the engine runs more that little spot gets bigger and the valve and seat both burn and you have no compression, a misfire, and guess what? have to pull the head. better to do it now and fix it right.

I cant agree enough, and after last semesters strength of materials class i know exactly what a small imperfection in a stressed machine part can lead to (especially one that works under extreme temperatures). That said I do plan on disassembling the engine eventually but for now I want to see if I can get by until I can land a nice internship to pay for everything. If compression ends up out of line then ill have to do it now. Otherwise I'll wait.

thanks for the replies everyone, ill update with the compression numbers soon. time to collapse into bed.