Look here for help first!well, I bet the iridiums are better, but i haven't tried them in the tercel, nor do i plan to unless I rebuild the engine.
it starts up like nobodys business now, its like half a crank and the engine is running! I also marked the top of the plugs so that the electrode is pointing the same direction for each cylender, I heard this is a trick used in racing to balance out combustion in each cylener, and i decided to try it cause its free, and it can't hurt.
mabey its just me wanting to think it made a differance, but the car idles better than i ever remember it idling before.
if you want something better than V-power, and you don't like the high cost of Iridiums, i'd check out the G-power plugs.
NGK G-Power
In indexing plugs, you install them with each electrode pointing in the same direction as the others. Think of the electrode as a hand on a clock... you pick a setting, say, 12 o'clock, and install each plug so the electrode is pointing exactly the same way. Each head design has a "sweet spot", and in high performance applications, this really does make a difference.
BTW, they make shims in varying thicknesses to allow this to be done accurately while getting the proper torque on the plugs.
BTW, they make shims in varying thicknesses to allow this to be done accurately while getting the proper torque on the plugs.
Here are your instructions.....
<a href='http://www.fordmuscle.com/archives/2000 ... ndex.shtml' target='_blank'>http://www.fordmuscle.com/archives/2000 ... x.shtml</a>
I was going to buy about 8 plugs and try this. Now where is the sweet spot? ...no I didn't say G spot either.
Maybe do this at the same time?
<a href='http://performanceunlimited.com/illustr ... plugs.html' target='_blank'>http://performanceunlimited.com/illustr ... gs.html</a>
Index AND sidegap.....plus reduce the gap? Plugs on the 3AC are easy to get to...
<a href='http://www.lubedev.com/articles/flameout.htm' target='_blank'>http://www.lubedev.com/articles/flameout.htm</a>
"Subject: Flameout
Author: Louis LaPointe
Date: February 18, 1998
Everyone loves a new car. One of my reasons for buying new was to get away from nuisance car problems--especially in this state of Minnesota where car problems can kill you and your kids if you get stuck in the wrong place in bad weather. Minus 35 degrees is not uncommon in the Twin Cities. A wind chill of minus 70 degrees turns your oil into a solid. One of my worst fears is getting stuck in a deadly blizzard. So I wanted to be safe and have NO car problems and brought home a brand new vehicle.
However I did not enjoy freedom from car problems right away. My car, a new 1995 Neon, coughed and chugged a couple of times then stopped altogether in the pouring rain. My friend, a fellow engineer, and I intended to go back to work after lunch. "It's missing," I protested, "It's almost a brand new car. This should not happen." The engine was missing like crazy in the wet atmosphere from the rain.
A spray can of silicone lubricant in the trunk provided a quick fix that I applied on the plug wires. The Neon started but still seemed to be missing. Later that evening, I replaced the spark plugs, but the missing persisted as the weather became colder. I noticed a consistent sparking and corona effect whenever I looked at the engine over the next few weeks, while it operated in the dark. It was a case of poor secondary insulation, I thought at first.
Years ago, I racked up hundreds of hours on engine and chassis dynamometers, so I am familiar with automotive diagnostics. I had worked at National Schools, an automotive trade school in Los Angeles, and felt I knew what was wrong.
Still, my Neon experienced a persistent missing condition and an occasional stall. The engine simply did not feel right, even after repeated plug changes. Finally, out of desperation and irritation, I checked the ohms resistance and gap of each new spark plug, keeping a record and testing a number of different brands. I followed scientific procedure.
Eventually the right solution came out after four or five plug changes. The missing condition appeared to be proportional to the resistance reading of the new spark plugs. The higher the resistance level--the worse the missing because apparently the spark never reached the plug. Each time the spark shorted, the cylinder flamed out and unburned fuel was pushed out the exhaust. After poking around at various auto parts stores, I looked for plugs with the lowest resistance levels. I took my multimeter with me to do a little testing with the help of cooperative parts counter guys. I found the ohms resistance in the most popular brands of plugs can only be called extreme, in my opinion. Even EXCESSIVE.
It became clear that the most serious missing came from plugs with 38,000 ohms of resistance or greater--according to my digital meter. The highest resistance I found measured 90,000 ohms--roughly20 times too much. This is measured from the tip of the center electrode to the end of the plug. I did not test any straight or non-resistance plugs. All the plugs I tested were resistance types, and it was remarkable that the various brands varied tremendously in their resistance levels. The missing disappeared with lower resistance levels under 10,000 ohms--regardless of the rain or snow or cold. Therefore some resistance is good but not an excessive amount.
A lot of people believe excessive secondary voltage is great. The main thing you get with superficially high voltage due to high secondary resistance is the appearance of a hot spark on your scope. That spike gets really tall. In reality, a secondary ignition system with very high voltage gives you voltage at the expense of the amperage firing across the gap. Yes, amperage is heat. Heat is energy. It’s not voltage that actually fires that mixture in the chamber--it’s the heat that burns the fuel. It’s the precious milliamps in the spark that provide the true ignition. I recall it’s about one-half of a milliamp. Yet nobody talks about spark amperage--just voltage.
What nonsense. I remember stopping a missing condition in a race car back in the early 70’s. We took a gas dragster to Half Moon Bay for a national meet. I set the plug gaps to just .015 inches or fifteen thousandths of an inch. Most plugs are set to .035. The missing stopped, and we won a national championship because for the first time the engine ran flawlessly past 10,000 RPM. No, I’m not saying you should set your plugs that close. That would be silly in a passenger car. Plus that was over 30 years ago. I’m only pointing out that the key to learning is induction and experience, not word of mouth or simply following what’s popular.
My recent experiment with resistance levels, for example, showed absolutely no missing occurred with NGK plugs. Some other good brands of acceptable plugs were only 5500 to 9800 ohms. The NGK plugs, at 4800 ohms, offered the best performance in any weather. I proved this by taking an 8,000 mile trip through the Western United States with my son. We drove through all kinds of climates, altitudes and even through a flood in Idaho. Not one single misfire occurred. The trip included endless high deserts, mountain passes and continental divides up to 10,000 feet. We drove freeways flowing at 90 miles per hour and also creeping Los Angeles traffic. My mileage ranged between 40 and 45 miles per gallon. For consistency I used the same gasoline, always Texaco or Shell. Not a single miss occurred.
In testing the plug cables, the plug cables themselves each had 4,500 to 5,700 ohms resistance. Thus the final (good) total resistance of plug and cable was about 10,000 ohms for the secondary for each cylinder. The secondary is merely a term for the path followed by high voltage that goes to the spark plug. So I concluded that about 10,000 ohms total resistance to each spark plug satisfied the necessary resistance level for good radio reception, proper secondary ignition and smooth operation.
Back to the original problem: Why on Earth did so many popular plugs have readings in excess of 38,000 ohms? As high as 90,000? There is absolutely no justification for that kind of resistance level. All it does is force the voltage to short circuit wherever possible--particularly in wet weather or when cold air may deposit a layer of ice on the plugs, plug wires and/or distributor cap. Yet nearly every popular plug had extremely high resistance values--even those I purchased directly at the dealer parts department.
Until I experienced this exercise, I had never checked the resistance value of my spark plugs. I just opened the new packages, set the gap and installed the plugs. Spark plugs, as everyone knows, are very simple devices. They fire the gasoline-air mixture in your car's cylinders. It is a trivial but important duty. Everyone takes their spark plugs for granted. Even the best mechanics never check a plug's resistance. It’s a completely unknown procedure.
It’s also well known that the average person cannot tell if their car is missing. Only when it dies completely does a motorist realize something may be wrong. In reality, if your plugs are too old or not right, you probably would never notice a slight or subtle miss. Or the symptoms may be so minor that they will pass unnoticed even by a mechanic. You need to be an expert on a machine called a dynamometer to detect poor ignition on your scope. However if the engine is not really cold or wet, a miss may not occur inside the shop. This may explain why it has taken so long to run this problem down. On the dyno, my engines have always been dry, warm and cozy. These convenient, dry conditions are artificial and cannot be considered realistic Minnesota driving conditions.
After hundreds of hours on dynamometers, working as an engineer on various projects many years ago, I was accustomed to searching for solutions to weird automotive problems. But I left the automotive field long ago and concentrated on computers. Until this problem popped up.
Examination of several engines running in the dark showed the spark jumping from the secondary to the primary. The spark jump or zap was even audible. This was clearly due to excessive resistance. In other words, the hot spark jumped right into the car's computer through the primary side of the ignition system. Imagine 20,000 volts getting into that very expensive computer system. That’s like a bullet into the very brain of your vehicle. As a side effect of the missing condition, my clutch lost perhaps 30-percent of its life due to the intermittent loss of power. It appears the car manufacturers and the plug makers should have foreseen such an abysmally obvious problem before they sold me this car with its badly designed plugs.
Based on my empirical findings, I am certain millions of cars are wasting gasoline and running poorly with the same badly designed plugs. These cars are probably in and out of the garage on a regular basis with no fix in sight.
In conclusion--switch your car’s plugs and mechanic to NGK or any plug with a reasonable resistance level for your car's sake, for your pocketbook and for the ecology. Wasted gasoline ends up in the air and water of our struggling planet. Give it a break. There’s a responsibility we all share together which is to preserve our oil reserves as long as we can. We must keep waste, to the best of our ability, out of the atmosphere. The condition I discovered with my car also existed in other cars I looked at. Changing to the right plugs has fixed the problem."
<a href='http://www.fordmuscle.com/archives/2000 ... ndex.shtml' target='_blank'>http://www.fordmuscle.com/archives/2000 ... x.shtml</a>
I was going to buy about 8 plugs and try this. Now where is the sweet spot? ...no I didn't say G spot either.
Maybe do this at the same time?
<a href='http://performanceunlimited.com/illustr ... plugs.html' target='_blank'>http://performanceunlimited.com/illustr ... gs.html</a>
Index AND sidegap.....plus reduce the gap? Plugs on the 3AC are easy to get to...
<a href='http://www.lubedev.com/articles/flameout.htm' target='_blank'>http://www.lubedev.com/articles/flameout.htm</a>
"Subject: Flameout
Author: Louis LaPointe
Date: February 18, 1998
Everyone loves a new car. One of my reasons for buying new was to get away from nuisance car problems--especially in this state of Minnesota where car problems can kill you and your kids if you get stuck in the wrong place in bad weather. Minus 35 degrees is not uncommon in the Twin Cities. A wind chill of minus 70 degrees turns your oil into a solid. One of my worst fears is getting stuck in a deadly blizzard. So I wanted to be safe and have NO car problems and brought home a brand new vehicle.
However I did not enjoy freedom from car problems right away. My car, a new 1995 Neon, coughed and chugged a couple of times then stopped altogether in the pouring rain. My friend, a fellow engineer, and I intended to go back to work after lunch. "It's missing," I protested, "It's almost a brand new car. This should not happen." The engine was missing like crazy in the wet atmosphere from the rain.
A spray can of silicone lubricant in the trunk provided a quick fix that I applied on the plug wires. The Neon started but still seemed to be missing. Later that evening, I replaced the spark plugs, but the missing persisted as the weather became colder. I noticed a consistent sparking and corona effect whenever I looked at the engine over the next few weeks, while it operated in the dark. It was a case of poor secondary insulation, I thought at first.
Years ago, I racked up hundreds of hours on engine and chassis dynamometers, so I am familiar with automotive diagnostics. I had worked at National Schools, an automotive trade school in Los Angeles, and felt I knew what was wrong.
Still, my Neon experienced a persistent missing condition and an occasional stall. The engine simply did not feel right, even after repeated plug changes. Finally, out of desperation and irritation, I checked the ohms resistance and gap of each new spark plug, keeping a record and testing a number of different brands. I followed scientific procedure.
Eventually the right solution came out after four or five plug changes. The missing condition appeared to be proportional to the resistance reading of the new spark plugs. The higher the resistance level--the worse the missing because apparently the spark never reached the plug. Each time the spark shorted, the cylinder flamed out and unburned fuel was pushed out the exhaust. After poking around at various auto parts stores, I looked for plugs with the lowest resistance levels. I took my multimeter with me to do a little testing with the help of cooperative parts counter guys. I found the ohms resistance in the most popular brands of plugs can only be called extreme, in my opinion. Even EXCESSIVE.
It became clear that the most serious missing came from plugs with 38,000 ohms of resistance or greater--according to my digital meter. The highest resistance I found measured 90,000 ohms--roughly20 times too much. This is measured from the tip of the center electrode to the end of the plug. I did not test any straight or non-resistance plugs. All the plugs I tested were resistance types, and it was remarkable that the various brands varied tremendously in their resistance levels. The missing disappeared with lower resistance levels under 10,000 ohms--regardless of the rain or snow or cold. Therefore some resistance is good but not an excessive amount.
A lot of people believe excessive secondary voltage is great. The main thing you get with superficially high voltage due to high secondary resistance is the appearance of a hot spark on your scope. That spike gets really tall. In reality, a secondary ignition system with very high voltage gives you voltage at the expense of the amperage firing across the gap. Yes, amperage is heat. Heat is energy. It’s not voltage that actually fires that mixture in the chamber--it’s the heat that burns the fuel. It’s the precious milliamps in the spark that provide the true ignition. I recall it’s about one-half of a milliamp. Yet nobody talks about spark amperage--just voltage.
What nonsense. I remember stopping a missing condition in a race car back in the early 70’s. We took a gas dragster to Half Moon Bay for a national meet. I set the plug gaps to just .015 inches or fifteen thousandths of an inch. Most plugs are set to .035. The missing stopped, and we won a national championship because for the first time the engine ran flawlessly past 10,000 RPM. No, I’m not saying you should set your plugs that close. That would be silly in a passenger car. Plus that was over 30 years ago. I’m only pointing out that the key to learning is induction and experience, not word of mouth or simply following what’s popular.
My recent experiment with resistance levels, for example, showed absolutely no missing occurred with NGK plugs. Some other good brands of acceptable plugs were only 5500 to 9800 ohms. The NGK plugs, at 4800 ohms, offered the best performance in any weather. I proved this by taking an 8,000 mile trip through the Western United States with my son. We drove through all kinds of climates, altitudes and even through a flood in Idaho. Not one single misfire occurred. The trip included endless high deserts, mountain passes and continental divides up to 10,000 feet. We drove freeways flowing at 90 miles per hour and also creeping Los Angeles traffic. My mileage ranged between 40 and 45 miles per gallon. For consistency I used the same gasoline, always Texaco or Shell. Not a single miss occurred.
In testing the plug cables, the plug cables themselves each had 4,500 to 5,700 ohms resistance. Thus the final (good) total resistance of plug and cable was about 10,000 ohms for the secondary for each cylinder. The secondary is merely a term for the path followed by high voltage that goes to the spark plug. So I concluded that about 10,000 ohms total resistance to each spark plug satisfied the necessary resistance level for good radio reception, proper secondary ignition and smooth operation.
Back to the original problem: Why on Earth did so many popular plugs have readings in excess of 38,000 ohms? As high as 90,000? There is absolutely no justification for that kind of resistance level. All it does is force the voltage to short circuit wherever possible--particularly in wet weather or when cold air may deposit a layer of ice on the plugs, plug wires and/or distributor cap. Yet nearly every popular plug had extremely high resistance values--even those I purchased directly at the dealer parts department.
Until I experienced this exercise, I had never checked the resistance value of my spark plugs. I just opened the new packages, set the gap and installed the plugs. Spark plugs, as everyone knows, are very simple devices. They fire the gasoline-air mixture in your car's cylinders. It is a trivial but important duty. Everyone takes their spark plugs for granted. Even the best mechanics never check a plug's resistance. It’s a completely unknown procedure.
It’s also well known that the average person cannot tell if their car is missing. Only when it dies completely does a motorist realize something may be wrong. In reality, if your plugs are too old or not right, you probably would never notice a slight or subtle miss. Or the symptoms may be so minor that they will pass unnoticed even by a mechanic. You need to be an expert on a machine called a dynamometer to detect poor ignition on your scope. However if the engine is not really cold or wet, a miss may not occur inside the shop. This may explain why it has taken so long to run this problem down. On the dyno, my engines have always been dry, warm and cozy. These convenient, dry conditions are artificial and cannot be considered realistic Minnesota driving conditions.
After hundreds of hours on dynamometers, working as an engineer on various projects many years ago, I was accustomed to searching for solutions to weird automotive problems. But I left the automotive field long ago and concentrated on computers. Until this problem popped up.
Examination of several engines running in the dark showed the spark jumping from the secondary to the primary. The spark jump or zap was even audible. This was clearly due to excessive resistance. In other words, the hot spark jumped right into the car's computer through the primary side of the ignition system. Imagine 20,000 volts getting into that very expensive computer system. That’s like a bullet into the very brain of your vehicle. As a side effect of the missing condition, my clutch lost perhaps 30-percent of its life due to the intermittent loss of power. It appears the car manufacturers and the plug makers should have foreseen such an abysmally obvious problem before they sold me this car with its badly designed plugs.
Based on my empirical findings, I am certain millions of cars are wasting gasoline and running poorly with the same badly designed plugs. These cars are probably in and out of the garage on a regular basis with no fix in sight.
In conclusion--switch your car’s plugs and mechanic to NGK or any plug with a reasonable resistance level for your car's sake, for your pocketbook and for the ecology. Wasted gasoline ends up in the air and water of our struggling planet. Give it a break. There’s a responsibility we all share together which is to preserve our oil reserves as long as we can. We must keep waste, to the best of our ability, out of the atmosphere. The condition I discovered with my car also existed in other cars I looked at. Changing to the right plugs has fixed the problem."
Give a boy a gun-give a biatch a cell phone-and pretty soon you almost got yourself a police state.
Orwell said: War is peace! Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength...
Orwell said: War is peace! Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength...
The way our heads are designed (according to my "Official Toyota "A" Series engine manual from 1979) pointing the plugs straight up points them at the exhaust valve more or less. Seeing as we have a "Wedge" or Bathtub-ish combustion chamber (again, by looking at the cross-section) then pointing the plug straight up points it towards the deepest part of the combustion vhamber at TDC. Heck, thats the way the plug points in the diagram lol.
This manual even has instructions on how to rebuild the Alternator, starter, water pump, all that good stuff. Its for the 1A-C, 2A, 3A & 3A-C engines. Its a 3/4 inch thick book all about the engine or whats mounted directly to it.
Section Index
General
Engine Tune-Up
Engine Service
Lubrication System
Cooling System
Fuel System
Starting System
Ignition System
Charging System
SST & Service Specifications (SST is Special Service Tools)
Works great for our 82 Toyota Corolla Tercel.
Any way I could PDF this?
This manual even has instructions on how to rebuild the Alternator, starter, water pump, all that good stuff. Its for the 1A-C, 2A, 3A & 3A-C engines. Its a 3/4 inch thick book all about the engine or whats mounted directly to it.
Section Index
General
Engine Tune-Up
Engine Service
Lubrication System
Cooling System
Fuel System
Starting System
Ignition System
Charging System
SST & Service Specifications (SST is Special Service Tools)
Works great for our 82 Toyota Corolla Tercel.
Any way I could PDF this?
RIP 10-07- 1984 Toyota Tercel SR5 4wd Wagen 6 speed
RIP 04-05- 1986 Toyota Tercel SR5 4wd Wagen 6 speed
1st Terc- 1987 Tercel SR5 4wd Wagon 6-speed, Sadly cubed
1985 Tercel Standard 4wd Wagon w/ 3-speed auto, Living a happy life in Boulder last I knew
RIP 04-05- 1986 Toyota Tercel SR5 4wd Wagen 6 speed
1st Terc- 1987 Tercel SR5 4wd Wagon 6-speed, Sadly cubed
1985 Tercel Standard 4wd Wagon w/ 3-speed auto, Living a happy life in Boulder last I knew
Since the plugs mount on the side...UP is probably about the only way to face them...maybe some bias towards the exhaust valve.....I have a head from a parts car...just need to look at it and I'll know.
Just one of those things I need to get a round tuit for....
Just one of those things I need to get a round tuit for....
Give a boy a gun-give a biatch a cell phone-and pretty soon you almost got yourself a police state.
Orwell said: War is peace! Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength...
Orwell said: War is peace! Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength...
-
Mac
- Highest Ranking Member
- Posts: 809
- Joined: Wed Apr 06, 2005 12:02 pm
- Location: surrey, BC, canada
well, since the plugs sit on the left hand side of the combustion chamber, i made the gap face towards the right.
made sense to me, thats where most of the fuel is and having the ground facing the right hand side and covering the spark from that side would, if anything reduce perfromance.
made sense to me, thats where most of the fuel is and having the ground facing the right hand side and covering the spark from that side would, if anything reduce perfromance.
Tercel 4WD "POWER WAGOON" with 4A-C
aka: "no powa steering tercel, oh oh oh!"
mods: ignition at 10 DBTDC and 90 octane gas.
aka: "no powa steering tercel, oh oh oh!"
mods: ignition at 10 DBTDC and 90 octane gas.
The plugs actually sit between the 2 valves...according to that article you want the opening facing towards the exhaust valve...this valve is either to the front or the back...depending on the cylinder involved...did mine...wasn't easy.
Probability theory would say that there would be equal chances that the opening would be up vs down...my 8 plugs all wanted to face down....SOBs!
Probability theory would say that there would be equal chances that the opening would be up vs down...my 8 plugs all wanted to face down....SOBs!
Give a boy a gun-give a biatch a cell phone-and pretty soon you almost got yourself a police state.
Orwell said: War is peace! Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength...
Orwell said: War is peace! Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength...