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Nah, you did nothing to hurt your effort, but I Really don't know if there is any measurable gain.
I remember when I was a teen I read an article in CAR CRAFT magazine about indexing my plugs. I did a set for my 71 roadrunner. I thought I was "on to" a speed secret my friend didn't have. The big Block Nova's still beat me.
I've done it before. Did it help anything? Heck if I know. But if its easy to in the stand than why not? Took me hours to do from under the car and over the fenders. I just bought a full extra set of plugs, marked the insulator side with the ground electrode using a permanate marker and found a plug that would seat where it should instead of using the little ring spacers they sell.
Good luck.
Ooops I see your already there with the marker and extra plugs. Congrats.
Last edited by cardo0; 07-28-2018 at 11:40 PM.
Reason: Ooops!
I suspect that unless you are using domed pistons or have something shrouding the spark plugs you'll likely not see much if any advantage to index plugs in your engine.
It won't hurt but I don't think you're going to see any improvement.
….. I thought about whether or not I had just inadvertently deposited an electrical path on the ceramics … so I washed the marker stripes off when I finished getting the plugs indexed …..
Nah, you did nothing to hurt your effort, but I Really don't know if there is any measurable gain.
I remember when I was a teen I read an article in CAR CRAFT magazine about indexing my plugs. I did a set for my 71 roadrunner. I thought I was "on to" a speed secret my friend didn't have. The big Block Nova's still beat me.
….. Meh ! … the only way for a Mopar to beat a Big Block Chevy was to index the plugs AND hang a supercharger on it ! … …..
Can't hurt and better balances out each cylinder as they are firing the same. Will it be a huge amount, no, but as you yourself know, each incremental improvement adds to the whole.
The one from Eaton Balancing evens shows how to make a little tool for future aligning. In the Eaton one, the author even discusses how detonation can be effected by electrode alignment and how the electrode can split the flame front. It was kind of interesting.
Thanks for bringing this up. I had to go out and do some searching and reading. That is how I found the above links.
I'm a skeptic. The effect would be theoretical, and so small as to be unmeasurable. The way to test would be to install all plugs in the most 'disadvantageous' position (ground electrode toward the intake) and dyno the engine, then index all of them and retest. You can't reliably measure less than a 10 HP difference on sequential dyno runs, and I would anticipate that if there is a difference with indexing, it would be on the order of 1-2 HP at most.
07-28-2018, 10:22 PM
Indexing Spark Plugs
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