and what do you tell the poor guy who follows your advice and breaks his sparkplugs at the 10-50,000 mile mark?

all so he could "PREVENT" his plugs from breaking later. changing the plugs early is a unnecessary risk. You effectively gain nothing while placing yourself in a 50/50 position for breakage.


1. preventative maintenance is something you do to prevent failure later.2. since when is it a fact that you will break plugs at the 100k mark?also, equating plug breakage to a stripped oil plug is ridiculous. a potentially several thousand dollar repair vs. about 1 hour of your time to drill/tap new hole...not even close to each other

 

even after 2 yrs of actively following the 5.4 3v spark plug issue, I still don't understand why people get so bent out of shape over this.

those who have experienced breakage...understandable. but for those who did the plug change "just because" or to "prevent later breakage"...what did you expect?

the reasoning that you can change the plugs at lower miles and the problem won't exist is fanciful thinking. I should do a search and find out how many people on this site have done the early plug change and broken a plug. And then compare it against those who waited until the 100k mark. I think the trend will show that the earlier changes/breakages far outweigh the specified interval changes.

 

oh yeah

say you average 20k miles per year...so roughly 5 yrs of driving will get you to the 100k mark.

or you average 12-15k per year...roughly 6.7 to 8.3 yrs to the 100k mark

assuming the plugs remain fully functional with no change in performance, you are looking at 5 to 8+ yrs of mileage before a plug change is required.

honestly, how many people will still have their truck at that point? I know I won't

 

I'd have to agree with Ryan50hrl about changing the plugs ASAP. It's a known and VERY documented issue. Sitting on a ticking time bomb and waiting till the timer is up does not seem like a very wise time to decide on defusing it.

As for your poll on changing the plugs early vs. changing them at 100K, how many people have reached 100K on their trucks yet? I haven't and I drive an '04 with 84K on it right now. I changed the plugs at 78K and you may recall the fiasco I had. I think it would be safe to say at this point that the poll will swing in favor of people breaking their plugs early simply because people with 100K on their trucks are a minority right now.

People with less than 30K shouldn't have any problems changing their plugs. If they do have problems it's probably from running a low quality gas in the engine. I agree that it is fanciful thinking that you won't break a plug at lower mileage and a few people are breaking them at lower mileage. So why would any one want to wait till 100K when the scale drastically tips in favor of breaking the plugs?

Following the TSB to the letter is no guarantee that you will not break a plug, especially at 100K. It's just some guidelines ford came up with to hopefully prevent you from completely F!@#ING up all of your plugs by trying to change them out like you would on any other engine.

I'm also a bit confused, you argue so aggressively about waiting till 100K to change the plugs but then you state that you probably will not have the truck long enough for that to be an issue?? I guess that falls in the category of the people who know the problem exists, refuse to correct it, run the crap out of their trucks and then pass it off to someone else making it the new owner's problem. All I can say about knowingly screwing your fellow man is.. thats just shameful.

I'll end with these parting words of wisdom:
Procrastinate or **********... either way you screw yourself.

cheers

 

I've been thinking about this spark plug problem for a while now. I've posted this before but I have an 04 SuperCrew FX4 with 178,000 miles on it. Only one plug has been changed due to the fact that I decided one Saturday afternoon to take a look at my plugs to see how they were holding up. Guess what, I broke it and it took me 2 days to get it out. This happened with about 110,000 miles on the truck. I replaced that one plug and said screw it and have been running the truck since with no problems. This truck gets 17 MPG every single day and it doesn't burn a bit of oil. When it reaches about 250,000 miles I will get another one and keep this one to beat on around the house. If the truck starts to run badly then I will change them out. Even if the heads have to come off I'll just put it in the garage and do it myself.

Hard to believe that with 178,000 miles this truck just seems to keep going. Oh sure, I've had issues with it, fuel pump, fuel pump driver module, alternator, battery, rear end seals along with a rear end rebuild at 100,000 but hey, $3000 in repairs with 178,000 miles is okay to me. I took the truck to a dealer the other day and they told me that they would give me $3000.00 for the trade in. I laughed and said I don't think so. This truck looks mint. The sales guy even commented that he hadn't seen an 04 look this good in a long time especially with the amount of miles. He said it looked like it had 40,000 miles on it. Too bad for the terrible trade in price because I probably would have bought another one. At this point I'll just keep running it and laugh at the fact that I haven't changed all the plugs yet!

 

I'm gonna have you do my plugs when it comes time to!

 

I didn't say it would be easy if I ever do the plugs. I'm just saying that until the gas mileage starts to suffer, I'm going to run the sucker!!! By the way, that one plug I did change was an absolute nightmare. Of course I didn't know about any type of TSB so I just muckled onto the plug and broke it in tow pieces. Maybe you can drive up here and we can do both of them at the same time.

 

I'm looking forward to the results of that poll tylus posted. I've been very attentive to this issue and while I've seen lots of post with high mileage plug change problems, I honestly can't remember reading a post of a user doing the change under 30K and breaking any off...not to say it hasn't been posted, I don't think it's terrible prevalent in lowing mileage rigs.

In my mind, it's just replacing a defective part before it creates a huge problem...if I can beat the clock. Just need a few hundred user to respond to the poll so that we can find a trend and see where the threshold mileage is for a go, no-go decision.

 

Look at this poll....I think it speaks for doing them early

 

We sold a used '04 at work that came back a little while later with a rough running concern. My tech tried changing the plugs and proceeded to break 2 of them...1 had the sleeve bonded to the side of the head. I think the truck only had 5xk on it. As soon as I found out he was going to attempt pulling plugs I contacted a friend at a Ford dealer for the bulletin. I loved the vote of confidence when she said something along the lines of "it'll tell you how to take them out and how to take them out when you break one because you WILL break one." Yah, nice.

I kept a copy of the bulletin for when my time comes (I'm almost hoping for an injector issue so Ford can take care of it LOL). If anyone needs/wants a copy, PM/email me with a fax number and I'll fax it to you

 

sorry, I forgot about this thread. my FTE e-mails haven't been the most consistent...but to answer your question Matt

 

Wow!!!

To Replace Or Not To Replace....

I Am At 36500 Or So.

If I Wanted To Replace Any Suggestions On A Great Replacement??

 

look at the poll I've got going right now. I geeked out tonight and did a rather in-depth search.

I personally say don't. others say do. Just remember that you will be footing the cost when/if a plug breaks.

That is enough for me to say leave it alone.

Broken = Fix it
Not Broken = Leave the hell alone