Lone Ranger

Okay, as some may know from recent posts I am in the (slow) process of changing out my 7mm OEM stocker spark plug wires to a set of Taylor Spiro Pro 8mm wires.

While I have everything apart I'm also pulling out each Rapidfire #14 spark plug and examining it for signs of normal or abnormal conditions.

Passenger side plugs looked okay-- a little excessive on the carbon but okay, not carbon fouled or close to carbon fouled. 2.59 rear end and lots of low rpm cruising around in OD probably responsible for some of the carbon build-up. These plugs have been in for about 10,000 miles.

Now this a.m. I take apart the driver side, jack her up, remove the wheel and A-arm debris cover etc. I pull the driver side plugs out one by one for inspection. #1 is damp and smells of fuel...same w/ #3 plug, same w/ #5 and #7 they all four are damp w/ fuel and you can smell it. They're not soaking wet w/ gas but enough that you can see they're not dry like the passenger side. About the same amount of carbon as passenger side, just that the carbon on the driver side plugs is moist w/ fuel.

I'm not inclined to believe that all my driver side injectors decided to crap out at the same time, so I kind of am ruling out injectors.

I'm also not inclined to believe all four of the OEM stocker wires for the driver side all had problems-- the OEM wireset only had about 12,000 miles on it, I am swapping to Taylors because I just don't care for carbon-core OEM wires and their 4000+ ohms of resistance.

The only thing that has changed recently is about 250 miles ago I changed the oxygen sensors on both sides.

DAMMIT, do you think the new O2 sensor on the driver side is bad? No codes stored by the PCM.

The only thing I can think to do is go ahead and drive her a bit after the new Taylor wires are on and then (aaarrghh) pull the driver side plugs and see if they are still gassed. If not it must have been the OEM wires (still don't seem likely), but if so then I need to look at that new O2 sensor on that side.

Everyone agree?


P.S. I still like my car but sometimes it aggravates the hell out of me and I have to walk away from it and stay away for awhile!

HammerDown

There's really nothing wrong with the stock wires, even though they are a higher resistance. The engineers who designed the ignition system used that resistance along with other factors to come up with a tuned circuit to deliver the most efficient spark energy under the expected driving conditions. So contrary to popular belief, lower resistance is not necessarily better. But you can argue that all day, so I digress...

Could be a bad O2 sensor, do you have a scan tool to look at the sensor output, or check the long term fuel trims for that bank?

Also, you could have leaking injectors, but I would be surprised if that many started leaking all of a sudden. Do you ever have problems starting the car after you have been driving it for awhile? That's a telltale sign of leaking injectors.

An easy way to test the injectors is to pull the fuel rail (with the injectors still on it), turn the key to run to energize the fuel pump and pressurize the rail, then watch the injector nozzles to see if any fuel leaks out.