Spark plugs: another easy way to fix serious problems

• Changed spark plugs and spark plug wires (Bosch)

Sluggish pick-up, tractor sounds, bad fuel burning, and mis-firing. These are all things possibly caused by bad spark plugs. Not surprisingly, my car featured all these exciting quirks, and as a result had a zero to sixty of about a year, and started with the reliability of an old Dell laptop (think: say nice words and it may start). After changing the spark plugs and wires, I now have slightly better performance! Also, the car starts on the first turn of the key! And best of all, the engine sounds like a car engine again!! I wanted to go on to change the timing, but had cut myself enough just changing the plugs so I left it for another time (and performance was good enough for now).

I'm not going to go into the details of how to change a spark plug here (on this car, any idiot could change them), however you should note that the bolt is not the standard spark plug size bolt. In fact, it's quite a bit larger and I had to use an adjustable wrench to get them out. Also the reader should note that I didn't have to gap the spark plug, as the spark plugs can be bought with the right gap nowadays (I wish I knew that before buying the gapping tool...).

Most notably, the mis-firing you see in an earlier blog (flames coming out of the carburetor) has now stopped entirely. This is due to the fact the old spark plugs were very oily (see image of one of my spark plugs below). Over time the spark kept reducing in size (due to crap build-up) till the spark was so small if didn't ignite the fuel anymore, resulting in excess fuel at times. At that point the slightest spark set of an enormous explosion that partially went out the carburetor. That's what I think happened, if anyone has any other suggestions please let me know as I'm just guessing here.

According to Haynes, this could be due to worn bores/piston rings, or valve guides, and sometimes occurs during the running-in period of the car (though only temporarily). Considering I recently changed the valve cover gasket (though I doubt this has anything to do with it) and don't drive very often, I'm going to be optimistic and say this is a temporary problem that has now been corrected.

So there we have a simple way of improving performance: change your spark plugs and spark plug wires. Baby steps towards getting back to (better than) factory settings.

A little cleaning can go very far

- Clean fuses, make lights (and other things) work

Uttering the loudest 'duh' of the century, I gazed upon the impressive sight that was all lights working on the B (well, except for the indicators). In the past only the headlights and the lights on the left side of the car worked, meaning that it would be illegal to drive at night and that I had a good chance of being pulled over at any time by a cop.

Where in the past I generally had several goals for the weekend and was only able to complete about half of one, this weekend I set one simple goal: fix the lights. Easy enough, I thought. I assumed that the bulb had either burned out, the contacts were dirty, the wires broken, .... . Worst case scenario I would tie the right lights to the left lights by a direct cable.

I did find it strange that the headlights worked normally, and even the brake lights on both sides worked - ruling out the possibility of dead wires or a bad connection on the right side. I assumed all running lights (not including headlights) were on the same circuit, however taking a look at the fuses showed that they are in fact not on the same circuit. Here are some circuits I've been able to deduce:

- Headlamps
- Brake lights
- Indicators
- Left running lights
- Right running lights

If one of these things don't work, the circuit is dead. I'm still trying to figure out what's wrong with the indicator.

Cleaning out the fuses (shop was too far away for me to go pick new ones up, and these were fine after a clean-up anyway - degreaser and some sand paper) and testing with a multimeter, amazingly the lights turned on! Who knows what else started working...

I've bought a timing light which I plan to use next weekend to adjust timing. My brakes should be arriving soon, so I'll try to get that done too. We'll see how things pan out.

Also I should mention that the tachometer completely randomly started working, but the clock stopped working. I don't know what I prefer. Tach, I guess.