I do no post nearly as much as I used to as my job, life and racecar take more time than my Volvo. That being said, I think this is my third "Mia Culpa" about stuff I preach to others and ignore myself.

I have had a hard-starting, slightly erratic idle and failure to start in extreme cold temps (-8f was the warmest) situation for about 18 months. I STILL have not cleaned my TB after 30K miles of driving but today I did the bare minimum tune-up items for a 170K car...cap, rotor, plugs. I also replaced a "marginal" AMM.

The plugs that came out were crappy Autolites, over-torqued and two center electrodes were more than 50% eroded. The gap was no where near appropriate. The cap had electrodes worn to less than 30% original thickness while the rotor electrode was almost level with the plastic. All, my bad..had the parts for almost two years.

Now the weird part...the plugs...they were all difficult to remove but none seem to have galled. On two the threads between the stud and threaded post were completely eroded. I mean, I could pull the wire off the plug and leave a basically smooth stud on the end of the plug.

My guess is that the studs (nipples) came loose in the package (common on motorcycle plugs) and the "mechanic" that installed the significantly sub-par plugs did not seat them. Time, vibration and crappy quality took their toll and electricity arched over the microscopic gap for many, many miles and eroded the plug-side threads.

I will do the TB. Throttle-switch service as soon as I have either a TB gasket or a spare file folder. The very new thermostat (Stant) seems to have already failed and the coolant temp sender is suspect so I will get to all of those right after the next race.

Again, thanks to all of you for the awesome sommunity!

Mike "Onkel Udo" Krenzer