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

[ZC_6Gen]

Anything not NGK or Denso will make your car run not the way it suppose to. Especially imports. I've experienced it with many of my cars.
Just recently a friend got his 6gc out from a shop. He got home fine. Then he tells his car idles funny and he wanted me to a adjust the idle air. I listened to the car as he gave it some gas. 2000 rpm and above it sound ok but with little sputters. But when at normal idle you can tell its sputtering really bad. I told him its misfiring because of fouled plugs. Little did we know while test driving the CEL came on. Went and bought some NGK's and replace it with the cheapo's that where installed. Ran perfect after a few seconds of start up. CEL still stored in ecu, scanned it and cleared misfiring code. Never came on since. So dont go cheap on the plugs especially for imports. It can cause other money eating problems like frying your distributor.$2.49 each for some ngk will save you time and $$$. Just my .2 cents.