Club 80-90 Forums

Came to do a service and found number 2 spark plug wont come out, I have a suspition in went in crossed thread when I installed it a couple of years ago!     Presuming I can force it out, do these reverse taps you can buy off ebay work? I dont want to have to remove cylinder head to do the job if I can help it, and I thought a simple service was going to be simple!!

only thing I can say is I had a SA van back in 2000s that hadn't been serviced for years and one of the plugs (also#2) wouldn't come out easily, as rusted solid, all of them were poor, but it could have been x threaded, I don't know - I resorted to a 2' breaker bar instead of the ratchet, after plus gas and heat cycles, and the plug simply sheared; spoke to Russel and he suggested a suitable size torque bit twatted into the remains of the plug might get enough purchase after heat and more plus gas.
It didn't work, ended up simply stripping the metal of the plug and the next size up torque bit would have just expanded the remains into the head so I stopped before I made it any worse, and bought a new engine from VW - I ended up getting the old engine rebuilt by Elite and afaik it is still powering the Hulley's van

I did it all cold so I'd suggest it might be worth getting the engine upto temp before next attempt to remove plug, get as much heat in the head as possible and then use rustof ice to cool the spark plug before try to loosen it
I wish you good luck Geoff

Get as much wd40 etc as you can around it ,if the engine runs run it until it’s hot, an impact gun is very handy for such things , it’s possible it’s just really tight so as Aiden says try a bigger bar