Darb

I just finished changing my spark plugs last night and luckily none of them broke!!! I did do alot of pre cleaning in the week before I took them out. I have an 04 lariat supercrew 5.4 with 81,600 miles. And I am pretty sure that they had never been taken out. First I started by putting 6-7 bottles of injector cleaner in the gas tank like Seafoam, gumout, marvel mystery oil, Boost octane. Then I used vacuum from air intake housing directly above throttle body and put a small vacuum hose into it and then put the other end into a bottle of sea foam and the motor sucked it up on it's on in about 10-15 seconds. I put 3-4 bottles of it and gummout into intake and it made some godawful white smoke for a little bit, as in like a freight train! I ran this for like 100 miles or so and then once I got my Lisle (broken spark plug removal tool in the mail I was ready. I used PB nutblaster and sprayed it down the socket hole, then I slowly and steadily turned the ratchet until they squeak a little and move just barely. Then I would let it sit and soak for 5 minutes and put the socket back on it and it might move a 1/8 of a turn and then I would let it sit and soak. I repeated this process on all plugs and they all came out although a couple of time I thought they were fixing to snap. After looking at the old plugs it is for sure that the additives worked because there was almost no carbon or crap on the ends of the plug. It took about 4-5 hours to do. Also I replaced the stock coils with Summit coils that produce 400 times more juice than stock (so they say). My truck runs like a scalded dog now with the airaid cai, flowmaster 50 series, summit coils, completely cleaned throttle body and mass air sensor, mobil 1 0-20 weight oil, optima battery, mobile 1 full synthetic transmission and transfer fluid, royal purple front and rear diff lube.

bfdtpkt

You have a 5.4, I guess?
What part number or coils did you get from Summit....I'm thinking I need it. Thx!

ca3sar

Ive done many spark plugs in my life. Are these that different? Is it the looseness process or what?

bfdtpkt

ca3sar....I apologize, I was referring to the COILS he said he bought from SUMMIT.

DannyOcean

wow, they claim they produce 20 million volts. Interesting.
Thing about electricity is that it only uses as much voltage as it takes to jump the plug gap, no more. So if i takes 5-10,000 volts to jump the typical plug gap, having 10 bajillion volt coils won't do a thing.

Just a tip, a squirt of penetrating oil in each plug well a few minutes before removing them helps the most. All those cleaners in the tank and running through the intake is likely to do more engine/O2/catalyst damage than help.

snowshredder555

Where'd you get your removal tool and what kind of plugs did you go with?

Price and all that info...please

-Ted

ATOM

go with motocraft plugs, the champion ones are a hit and miss, some engines won't run worth crap with 'em

ford sells the rotunda too, also snap on does too. i am sure others sell it, there are some on ebay too.

Darb

It's really hard for me to believe that the additives did not blow out the carbon and other crap when the original plugs that I pulled out were almost shiny with absolutely no buildup at all on the bottom of plug. If you are right then I have the worlds cleanest 5.4 with 81,000miles ever. If all it takes is penetrating oil, then why is it that everywhere you turn on this forum you read horror stories about changing these plugs. I bought my truck from the dealership and know for a fact that these are original plugs with 81,000miles. The tool I bought is made by a company named (Lisle) www.lislecorp.com it is 75$. There are actually 3 tools out there for this job one of them being the rotunda by ford. After reading hours worth of info on here the lisle is the easiest to use and best tool for this job. I went with motorcraft plugs because the champions are wishy washy at best according to users, I just googled the lisle tool and found the cheapest website. Lisle broken spark plug removal tool 5.4 liter..... Is the exact name of the tool. By the way the tools are different with different designs and methods for getting the plug out, this is the only one that can grab ahold of the ceramic porcelain. By the way Dannyocean what does upgraded ignition system do? As In like a mallory or msd, just curious because it seems that I have the wrong impression of what these do. If one were to put different spark plugs in the truck like the new E3 's or even just had a larger gap would the more volts not come in handy since the area in which the ark must travel is much larger and possible to have multiple simultanious arc's like on the E3 plug or a spltfire or something? Also I'm pretty sure that programming the computer with a custom gryphon tune programmer would make a huge difference and given the fact that you can change and control any and all engine peramiters I can't see why these coils have not helped!

hh928

Darb,

I went to www.lislecorp.com and could not find a spark plug removal tool. Did you mean the re-thread tool they sell? More info please?

Thanks,

Hh928

DannyOcean

Mainly because its people that do not follow the removal procedure



Penetrating oil works for me and I haven't broken one yet. BTW, the fluid needs to penetrate from from outside of the plug and down through the threads. It doesn't work the other way around but I'm sure your combustion chambers are squeaky clean!

MSD's or Multiple Spark Discharge is really a fancy way of firing more than one spark in the cylinder. Mind you, you only need one spark and more than one is not needed as the mixture will be ignited and burned. Ford used to use a waste spark method but that had to do mainly with emissions. Even a fairly modified street engine will see no benefit from a MSD. For racing purposes its used to prevent a misfire due to insufficent coil saturation and dwell time and the generally much richer mixture.

I wouldn't recommend increasing your spark gap to "take advantage" of the increased coil output. For one, you are still burning the same amount of fuel/air so there is really no need. One side effect of running too high ignition voltage is melted electrodes and holes burned in pistons.

The coils you used will be fine but because they put a few extra windings in them and call them "better than stock" is really a misnomer.

Now if you were using these in a supercharged application and were cranking up the boost, then more voltage may be needed to jump the spark gap as it takes more energy for the spark to jump the denser mixture. On the other hand most tuners will decrease the spark gap when increasing boost to prevent the boost/mixture from extingishing the spark. This would be in fairly high boost applications. I used to decrease my plug gap by .004 when I was running 14lbs of boost with my Procharger an old Mustang of mine.