First of all thank you to those that took the time to offer up advice on the previous post concerning the 92 ranger melting plugs. After being advised repeatedly ( i'm a little hard headed from time to time ) to investigate the intake manifold gaskets for a vacuum leak- i did. I pulled the lower intake and valve covers yesterday, low and behold both of my problems came to the light. I had an intake leak occuring on #5 cylinder, and a bent exhaust valve on the #4 cylinder(noted by the broken guide lip and pushed up valve seal). Going home after work today to pull heads, check cam and lifters while I'm in there... thanks again to all.

 

Good feedback on your plug melting problem & to hear you think you've found the root cause.

Keep us posted on how it goes.

 

Soon I will have pics uploaded of how everything looked after the heads came off yesterday. Found a head gasket leak @ #5 as well.

 

I bought some new heads with valves on eBay. Not too bad a price. It made it much simpler to just pop the new heads right on with all new gaskets as opposed to more downtime dealing with the valves themselves. On my brothers van, we were not sure exactly what was wrong however, it had either a valve problem or a crack in the head, neither of which is visible to the naked eye. The new heads took care of the problem.