Old sparkey!

Well I though I would share my experience in the hopes that it may help somebody else out. I have garaged my 348 for the last nine months or so since I received my last speeding ticket and while I work on the project Dino. Soooo I decided to pull the old beast out and take her on a road trip through Yosemite and down 395 to Mammoth lakes. When I did the top end rebuild about 4 years ago I chose the Denso Iridium plugs and being a typical mechanic I put the new plugs back in the way the old ones were (without the threaded tips installed). All was well for the 4K miles that I put on it with the very rare blip of the 1-4 check engine light. It always came up lambda codes 1211 and 1212 when I pulled the codes. I went through all the typical rigors of testing MAF resistance, swapping O2 sensors between the banks, scoping the O2 patterns, and compression was rock solid at 200psi on all cylinders. Never could get the ghost out until today. So had to get the beasty smogged and of course it started running like a dog on the way with the 1-4 CEL lit continuously. I'm thinking great WTF is it now!! So I popped out the 1-4 check engine light and headed off for smog knowing that 99.99% of cars have one check engine light and the 5-8 light would be enough to fool the smog tech. I kept my fingers crossed and luckily instead of hooking up the dual exhaust probes and testing both banks of the engine the tech just did one on the 5-8 bank. It passed with flying colors! He was confused why it ran like it did but still passed smog. I kept my mouth shut and happily forked over the fee. Ok so next stop the shop. I immediately pulled all of the plugs for a read and re-did the compression. Plugs looked good and compression was still 200 on all cylinders phew! I pulled out the wires (Ferrari OEM) and saw a bit of rust on the tangs that are supposed to contact the plug tips. Ok not too bad so I just saved $500 for wires. I noticed one wire had one of the screw on tips seated in it! Bingo! I ran around the shop and scavenged 8 new tips from another motor. Longer story short they are supposed to have the tips as verified by popping one of the plugs into the wire tip. Codes are now gone, idle is stable! So for 4K miles the spark was jumping a gap at both ends of the plugs so no wonder the residual rust in the wires. All is good now and running very smoothly. Let's hope nothing else goes wrong as I noticed that the fans came on a little late around 210 degrees. Of course I don't have pictures of what I am talking about but maybe somebody can post up a pic of a spark plug with and without the tips for the lesser informed.

 

They do. I was thinking that too but I guess the catsalyst is able to clean it up enough. It would go back and from smooth to the ocasional lower rpms. I do have just one of the factory mufflers so there might be less mixing. When I drove it was down on power during acceleration but it did not act like an ignition miss. Cruise was fairly stable. When I was getting it smogged and up to just after I wrote the post I was still thinking 1-4 and 5-8.