[lawdude]

My friend had a problem with a misfire in cylinder 3 so he replaced all plugs.

Misfire vanished. Attached is a picture of his plugs. #1 is on viewer's left and #6 is on the right.

Image quality was reduced to facilitate upload.

[Italia335i]

How many miles tuned when this occured?

[lawdude]

A little over 30k.

<edit> Oops. I didn't notice the word "tuned". I'm not exactly sure, but it's been tuned for most of the time he's had the car. </edit>

[Italia335i]

That sounds about right.

I am around 16k (tuned since 500) and I am contemplating changing mine just to keep everything running as good as possible.

Thanks for the info Mike.

[lawdude]

You are welcome sir.

[lawdude]

Oh, FWIW. It seems he just happened to look into the plug well before installing the new plugs and noticed dark particulate matter around the all the plug holes. Out of an abundance of caution he used his home vac and it came right out.

[Hit_Apex]

How long has the car proven to be misfire-free since the replacement? I replaced single plugs chasing a misfire issue and it had nothing to do with the plugs. I'm not discounting your experience, but those plugs look pretty good. Could be bad gas or a small boost leak among other causes of misfire codes.

[lawdude]

He replaced them today. I'll let you know if he starts bitching when the misfire returns.

[Kevin@AKMotorwerk]

spark plugs dont have to be black or anythign to be bad, basically when the electrode loses its sharp edges the spark is inefficient, so cleaning an old spark plug is useless too, while the spark plug is working it slowly erodes the sharp edges off into a barely visable rounded state and the spark is not as powerful when that happens

[scalbert]

FYI, I( changed mine out this weekend at 21k miles and they looked similar. No misfires or any real reason to change them other than just for the heck of it.

[thegeneral101]

Originally Posted by sexye92

spark plugs dont have to be black or anythign to be bad, basically when the electrode loses its sharp edges the spark is inefficient, so cleaning an old spark plug is useless too, while the spark plug is working it slowly erodes the sharp edges off into a barely visable rounded state and the spark is not as powerful when that happens

never knew that

[inthemiddle]

yea.. i did mine this weekend too... at 24K miles... looked the same... i'd never had any misfire CELs or anything.. but i had had a couple weird stumbles at idle around 23K .... so i figured i might as well try that.... we'll see...

[bolty]

just out of curiosity, how much is a full set of plugs??

[hun77777]

Originally Posted by bolty

just out of curiosity, how much is a full set of plugs??

+1. tried couple of dealers they gave me different prices with different parts numbers. $29.42(12-12-0-037-244) and $24.18(12-12-0-034-087). I'm bit confused by these numbers... also it seems that tischer's selling it for $80 but only when i purchase the socket...

[lawdude]

Mr. 5 has a thread on this. Cheapest plugs are somewhere in the neighborhood of $75 shipped and cheapest socket is somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 shipped.

Found it:

http://www.e90post.com/forums/showthread.php?t=192943