Had a little incident today with my '01 F150 4.2l, 95k miles. Was driving down the interstate at about 70mph when I heard a boom and then a loud chug chug chug sound. Pulled over and saw half of a spark plug dangling from the front left spark plug wire, it just blew itself right out. The other half of the plug was still screwed into the hole.

I limped off the highway on 5 cylinders and having no tools on me, pulled into the first mechanic I saw. He was nice enough to stop what he was doing and come outside, remove the other half of the plug, and put in a replacement that he had lying around so I could get back home. I threw him $20 bucks for helping me out and drove home without incident. He did comment that he has seen other F-series in the past with the same problem occur, and that I was lucky because no real damage occurred.

So basically the moral of the story is dont try and squeeze the 100k miles out of the motorcraft platinum spark plugs. Ill be replacing the rest of the plugs tomorrow.

 

that sucks...

 

xs2

 

You were super lucky there was no head damage. Go play the lottery tonight 'cause it's your lucky day.

 

This looks completely different than the "normal" plug blowout.

The "normal" way is the complete plug comes out due to the threads failing in one way or another.

This looks more like just a defective spark plug.

Both of mine that blew out the "normal" way had the electrode smashed, but the plugs were still in one piece, just completely out of the head. The threads in the head were unusable afterward too.

 

Strange to see this on a 4.2 v6 most of the plug blow outs have been on the 5.4 engine.

 

That's not the case here..

 

His plug did not blow out, his plug blew apart.

 

yeahh, after it rusted out lol

 

How sad that americans cant even make a spark plug anymore. Quality is the last thing in the American language, engineering great, parts suck. They just try to cheapen everything to the last degree to make a buck. Oh no wonder the space shuttle blew up. Funny we put a man on the moon with the good old boys, but cant put a spark plug together. NAFTA sucks, inferior everything from south of the boarder. Sorry, just makes me sick.... If we go to a real war we are going to suck big time, Spark plug times ten failing on everything......

 

lenore - he put over 100,000 on those Motorcraft plugs - that's almost twice the life expectancy seeing how the books suggests changout at 60,000.

I'de say us Americans did a pretty damn good job on the Motorcrafts..

Communist lol

 

Yep, like a new tire never goes flat, never get water in the gas, radiator never springs a leak, hoses never go bad, no spark plug machine ever has a bad run.
Good thing this was not a BOSCH plug or we would never hear the end of it!

 

LOL

True that!!

 

If you look closely at the bottom of the plug it is stamped with "made in China"

 

That is my point, if we keep ordering stuff from inferior manufacturors, (Mexico, China, whatever) and at the lowest bid, then how are we going to compete with our rivals which still require some kind of quality. God help us if we really go to war and we fight the Chinese with the substandard crapthey sell us, when the stuff they keep is better than ours. The American corporate world is bottom line and hell with quality, make my buck now syndrome which is killing us. That spark plug should not have failed that way. Maybe the electrode eating itself do to spark, but not blowing out. Just my thoughts this morning.