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]

So I ran a compression test after driving the car this morning and was pleased with what I saw:

the reading were roughly 190 across for all four cylinders

those numbers are 11 lbs over spec as my manual says i should be getting 179 psi so it is a little strange... The important thing is consistency between cylinders which is exactly how it should be for an engine with ~ 80k.

despite the good readings I'm still going to pay close attention to that engine in case any underlying problems surface.

Thanks for your input guys