I'm 2 hours from home #10 spark plug blew out I pulled the injector cable and coil cable is it safe to drive home that way?

 

it'll be loud as hell, but with no gas washing the cylinder it should be ok, slow n steady.

 

60 more miles to go. Monitoring codes with a obdii setup and so far gotten a "bank 2 too lean" and missfiring on cylinders 2,5 and 10 (10 being the one with no plug).

 

You can drive like that, it's just noisy.

 

That's kinda weird why it say 2 5 and 10. Some one really need to design a computer that actually reads the engine

 

I hope you make it without any issues. Good luck.

 

That sucks. My Crown Vic blew a plug on me a few years ago as I was getting on the highway in a snow storm. I drove the ~20 miles home with the injector still connected and made it... hopefully you made it ok too

 

It's not weird, IIRC cylinders 2 and 5 are next to each other in the firing order, making it hard to isolate. And with cylidner 10 existing as a giant air pump flooding the exhaust with oxygen the PCM is going to think that the entire bank is running far too lean. Which is going to cause bank 2 fuel trims to spike as the PCM adds fuel attempting to correct a false lean condition. Running that rich can cause misfires.

ON edit: I was a little off. Cylinders 2 and 10 are next to each other in the firing order, so the PCM is confusing those two.

 

Made it to my sisters house by Seattle. Made it here without too much trouble. Got some strange vibrations depending on the rpms. Tomorrow is the end of the trip home. 6 hrs with this thing going over two passes. I'm a bit worried but a local mechanic quoted me $1600 to pull the head and fix the plug. If I can get it home, I'm going to team and tap the head on the truck with the good kit instead of the cheap dorman fix kit.

 

Yeesh...that's a bad idea. You may be buying a new catalytic converter by that point, running rich on the right bank for that long is gonna do some BAD things.

If you absolutely must drive it home, get underneath and unplug the upstream oxygen sensor on that bank. That'll force the engine to run open loop without falsely enrichening the mixture on that bank.

 

I think I would come up with a different alternative. Driving it that far seems too likely to do damage. Ironically mine blew one out last night. I keep a kit I got from O'Reilly right in the truck. Fixed it and drove it home. Hopefully it lasts the one I did on my excursion was still holding when I got rid of it.

 

$1600? The guy who bought my Crown Vic had a $60 helicoil kit and it took him like 45 minutes... he bought it 2 years ago and still drives it everyday.

 

I feel like for 1600 u can just buy a brand new head for that

 

well we made it home. It did well and got us back safely. She's a good truck. We just pulled in last night and the next couple of days will be very full days at work so i'll have to let the X rest for a few till i have a chance to dig into it. Things i've learned is the dorman kit is strictly a temp fix. It's completely dependent on the condition of the already messed up threads so there's almost no way to tell if it'll hold for a minute, a day, a month or a year. What i did run into is that the plug that comes with it (Autolite HT1) is complete garbage. it's fries itself in a few hundred miles. There's a cross referenced plug that can be substituted (Champion 7989) that worked well. If i had know that to begin with it's possible that the kit would have held. BUT the temps produced by the autolite literally melted the plug and part of the adapter and i'm sure a section on the threads of the head as well so it's no surprise it blew out after another 800 miles. The thing i did notice is that on that blow-out, both the plug and the adapter were in perfect shape so that was strictly due to the threads on the head failing.

I'm certain the only path forward is buying the correct repair kit and attempting it at home without removing the head on the #10 cylinder. It's not going to be easy back there.

 

Posted this in your plug thread back in 2013.



Stewart