FYI - E3 Spark Plugs

I put them in my lawn mower and the grass bag holds a lot more grass then it used to.

If this was true, why don't they install them at the factory? Don't you suppose Ford would like to improve the gas mileage for a few pennies per plug - oh wait, Ford has actual engineers that know what they are doing. They actually carefully test things and don't delude themselves.

Ed

----- Original Message ----- From: "OldHarleyRider" Newsgroups: alt.autos.ford Sent: Saturday, May 08, 2010 9:21 PM Subject: FYI - E3 Spark Plugs

FORD ???? This is the same company that puts upper control arms and ball joints on their vehicles with no grease fittings.... (I replaced mine with Moog, with grease fittings) This is the same company that had to recall vehicles because of a cruise control malfunction.

Hmm, the ball joints on my explorer with no grease fittings have managed to go 137,000 miles so far. The ones back in the old days that had grease fittings and got greased regularly rarely made it to

50,000, sometimes not even 25,000. There's a lot more to ball joint life then whether or not they have grease fittings....

=A0The ones back in the old days

Not to say you were guilty of it, but sometimes the factory kept the grease zerks off for a reason other than to save money on grease zerks. It used to be that every time a car got serviced, the grease monkey had to shoot grease into the ball joint....until the boot popped. Then all your moisture and dirt got into the moving parts. Also, people would shoot the cheapest, sh*ttiest, grease they could could get into the ball joint, with disastrous results. The factory would put good grease into the factory parts and they wanted it to stay there. A few years ago, I retired a car at 300K miles with all factory chassis parts. The chassis was greased probably four times in it's whole life.

No one has produced cars with zerk fittings on ball joints and universal joints from the factory since the 70's. No matter how fancy the spark plug electrodes are, the electricity travels in the path of least resistance.

Or pumped in the grit that was sitting on top of the zerk.

Ding-ding-ding... we have a winner!

Now we get into the argument of what was the shape of the old plugs you took out? I found that if I drive like there's an egg between my foot and the gas peddle and brake peddle, and keep my speed at or below 55, my mileage goes through the roof. Of course my girlfriend gives me grief about driving so slow.

The plugs that were in the truck were great. Truck ran great. But they had 100,000 miles on them. So, I tossed them and put in the E3 plugs. Truck runs even better now.

I don't wait until something stops working to replace it, thats why I never get stuck on the side of the road. It is called "Preventive Maintenance."

Maybe it only ran better because you are comparing them to worn out plugs that had 100,000 miles on them and probably also had a gap so big that they barely worked. You do have to periodically remove double platinum plugs to regap them. The only car I've ever had that ran better with "fancy" spark plugs was my 1985 Escort GT. And even then the only improvement was that I didn't have to frequently clean the plugs and carbon deposits off the inside of the dirstibutor cap every few thousands miles. The Splitfire plugs did work better than regular plugs. But that was before regular double platinum plugs were the norm. With all the regular double platinum and Iridium plugs around, you really don't need anything fancy unless your particular car seems to like them.