Today I decided to change my plugs. Truck has 108,000 miles.

I only broke one plug. Yea!, but I have an issue.

I used the Lisle tool to remove the remaining shell. I followed the directions and the shell came out but one half of the ground strap on the spark plug broke off.

I've tried to vacuum this piece out but so far have been unsuccessful. It started raining so this is put on hold for a bit.

Has anyone had this happen before and if so how did you get this piece out? It's not magnetic, so it makes it rough.

In this picture I manually broke off the porcelain. The only piece in the engine is the metallic piece missing in the picture. Sorry the picture isn't clear.



Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

If it is still in there you may want to try a keyboard vac and if you can get your hands on a boroscope it might help in the retrieval and maybe try some tape wrapped around a clothes-hanger i can feel your pain good luck

 

You might be able to use a long swab (longer than a Q-tip) and slather it with vasiline, it might stick to that and the vasiline won't hurt the bore.

You taped a small hose to the vac to try to get it out, right? something that will go down into the bore. And are you sure it didn't get vaccumed out?

Good luck.

 

Since my post, I used a shopvac and a micro sized computer cleaning kit but it was not small enough to go into the spark plug hole. I taped a regular drinking straw to the kit and listened closely but didn't hear anything.

I took apart where I taped the shopvac attachment and straw together and something small (and metallic) hit the floor but I haven't been able to locate the missing piece. I've looked high and low. I'm hoping this was it since I'm not sure what else it could be.

The swab idea sounds good. I think I'm going to find a borescope to make sure it's not still in there. Thanks for the replies. If anyone has any more ideas please let me know.

 

One thing that might work is have a buddy crank the truck a couple times while you have the shop vac and micro computer cleaning kit, once the piston hit's tdc, it will be closer to the vacuum source, thus it will suck it into the cleaner.

 

I had 3 plugs that looked like that when I pulled them with my Lisle kit (6 of 8 plugs broke). Not one of the breaks looked clean though, as in shiny, like it just happened. All 3 were dirty looking, like they were old. I still vacuumed out each cylinder with my shop vac. I put a long enough piece of rubber hose in the end and secured/sealed it with a good wrapping of duck tape. The hose was the right o.d. to fit right in the plug hole (5/8?). Tried the q-tip with blue grease to get some of the porcelin pieces, before I stepped down the shop vac. It worked ok, shop vac was better.

 

Please don't crank your engine. If that piece gets wedged between the piston and cylinder wall you can seriously scratch it or worse.

attach a small rubber hose (like windshield washer hose) to the end of the vacuum and stuff it down there.

 

When I first saw the Lisle extraction tool, and watched a video of it in action, this is exactly the kind of thing I saw happening. Personally, I don't like how it pushes everything towards the cylinder before it pulls the sleeve out. It may work, but I don't believe it's a very well designed tool.

 

Yeah, I wasn't excited about the way the Lisle tool pushes things further into the cylinder. I wished that I could go back in time and not push the porcelain down as far as the instructions stated.

It would have probably still broke but maybe it would have stayed attached to the shell. for anyone else using the Lisle tool, you do not have to crank the pusher tool all the way down until it stops. On this particular plug, the tap went almost all the way into the shell (no threads visible) and still had a good 1/8 inch between where the tap ended and where the top of the porcelain started. Lisle probably has it push farther so the tap tool has a good chance to bite without porcelain getting in the way. I think breaking off the tap would be a worse problem than I'm having now.

I think the Rotunda tool solution of pulling the porcelain out is overall a safer solution.

 

Are you sure there is a piece missing? Am not being critical, was in the same boat a couple months ago.

Was sure I was missing a piece in the engine. broke the ceramic off that was sticking out the end of the ground shield and bent the electrode back so the ends lined up. Compared it to one that wasn't broken. They were identical.

There was not a piece missing in my case, it just looked that way from the way it was shoved out of the way by the ceramic being jammed out the end.

 

I took a closer look and I noticed that what you said was true. I removed the broken half and it fit perfectly to the other side. You can see in the picture that the porcelain pusher stretched things a bit and made the sides of the ground strap quite a bit longer than an undamaged plug.

It looks like the weak spot is the 90 degree bend area and that's where mine broke.

Thank you so much Wrenchbender for suggesting for me to check this. I feel so much better knowing that nothing is in the cylinder.

 

that's great another success story . i bet you slept pretty good last night with that piece of mind

 

Harbor Freight sale a mini B&W camera, it has a little monitor and a camera attached to a flexible "straw" I always think it's usefull to inspect inside cylinders but I don't have experience with the image quality we can get with no or little light. That camera cost around $100

 

That is great news! I always enjoy seeing helpful suggestions, and others can definitely learn from and benefit from it.

 

Your are quite welcome! Just glad I was able to help.