This winter I have been doing quite a few projects on the L. Lower pulley and new belt, ramair system, had chip redone, driveshaft loop, new plugs, headers, boost bypass, pcv vavle fix. Last night was driver's side spark plug night, I had been dreading this since the passanger side last weekend. Before starting the job I had read as many tips and instructions as possible, and armed myself for this job and the other mods with more and more tools! The job was going not to bad until the front plug on the driver's side. I got stock plug out, put new one in and tightened down. Pulled whole socket/extension mess out and guess what? No rubber book inside the sparkplug socket anymore! Gee, it's stuck on the plug and pushed itself down as well. Wowee, how nice Ford did a wonderful design where they cover the plug and recess it deep into the head as well! I ended up removing the p/s resevoir, the brackets, etc to get a clean shot at the plug hole. No amount of fiddling around though could get that sucker out of there. As a last ditch try I smeared the inside of the plug socket with superglue and jammed it into there and waited 10 minutes, then ever so gently wiggled and got the boot out of there! Finished up driver's side about 11pm. Now I have to manage to jam those Bassani headers in, that should be really fun. At this point I actually am sick of mod work, I just want to drive and have some fun! I hope all this pain in the *** is worth it in the end.
So, Sears craftsman spark plug sockets suck big time. Also, coming from a guy who was a former riceboy and had hondas and vw's... they were 10 times easier to work on than this truck! You would think a big truck with a big engine bay would be better layed out than this. If I was a judge and some SVT engineer was getting sentenced by me I would make them work on their vehicles during their prison time and perhaps that would do some good. Ahhh, I guess it's not just them though... alot of cars and trucks, WTF? It's like they are designed to never be worked on. Just really aggravating.
Thank you for letting me blow off steam. I think I better do some meditation or something Zen before installing those headers, after reading the installation instructions and seeing what I am up against! Can anyone answer me on that, the directions tell me to take out the oil dipstick tube on the driver's side... won't that cause oil to leak all over the place?

 

For what its worth I found a nice three piece locking extension set @ Sears, but they were from SK.

They were $75, but that beats the hell out of one socket for $50.

 

One of my favorite saying's

If it has **** or tires, it's trouble!

I feel your pain brother, lowering kit was about the same for me.