I’d been meaning to change my sparks plugs for several years. The car hit 200,000 about 4 years ago and a brand-new set of plugs has sat in my possession for about the same time. The car is now at about 235,000 miles, but I’d been putting off doing the job because I didn’t really know how to do it and I knew it would not be simple. However, recently I had much under bonnet stuff removed to change the heater pump and to do some other jobs and so this was the opportunity to go ahead and do it. Firstly, I had to find the existing plugs. On the driver’s side access was reasonable easy, but on the other side, access was considerably hampered by LPG pipes and cabling.
The plugs are at the other end of the coil packs which are covered by a simple plastic covering that pulls off much like the engine cover. With the cover removed there’s one screw holding the coil pack in place, I think it was 10 mm and then there’s the electrical connector to remove. I found this tricky to get off. There’s only one tab, but they all seemed to have stuck in place after so many years undisturbed. I prised them off with a small screwdriver. The coil packs came out OK but are a tight squeeze between the engine and the side of the engine bay, particularly the second one in. With the coil pack removed, I then needed to remove the old plug. This is not as easy as it sounds.
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Tools for the job – magnet and 2 spanners
It took a plug socket with a UJ and an extension to be able to get into the hole where the plug was. I removed the rubber ‘grip’ from the spark plug socket, because otherwise If I needed to withdraw the socket and extension etc., it could pull apart randomly leaving part of it in the hole and then become difficult to retrieve. Once the spark plug was unscrewed, I used a magnet on the end of a flexible shaft to retrieve the plugs. To fit the new one, I went and bought a cheap T-bar spark plug spanner and modified it so that it was no longer a ‘T’, but an inverted ‘L’. With this, I was able to gently screw by hand the new plug in place a few turns and then use the extension/UJ assembly (rubber ‘grip’ removed) and finally a torque wrench to fully screw them in to the correct torque. This procedure worked OK, for the 3 plugs closest to the front on the driver’s side, but access to the rear most plug was difficult. To gain access to this one, I removed the boxing around the master cylinder, but to do this first requires the wipers to be removed to be able to remove the rear plastic scuttle.
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Pollen filter box removed – top of coil pack just visible.
