Spark Plug Blaster

[chasracer]

The first time I ever came across one of these was back when my next door neighbor had some interesting cars. One in particular was a Model A that I guess had a tendency to foul spark plugs. One day he took me up to the local garage and showed me how to use a spark plug sandblaster. I use the one mounted at the end of my workbench rather frequently now and find that it saves me quite a bit of money on plugs. Now right off, if you are using the newer plugs with platinum or other precious metals you should be getting 80-100 thousand miles out of those and a plug blaster wouldn't work on those anyway, it would just destroy them.

Plug blasters can be found online or at Harbor Freight or Northern Tool outlets. The design hasn't changed on them in 40+ years I guess, the one I have looks just like the one he showed me when I was a kid. It does take a bit of practice to use one correctly and get the most out of it. I have a quick connect fitting on mine so it takes just a minute to connect the air line and it's ready for use. With a sparkplug in place, you hold the button down and the air pressure will pick up the silica and blast it around the base of the plug. One thing that you need to do is rotate the plug while you are blasting it, this allows the blast media to clean the entire plug. Once that is done, I take an air gun and spray off any loose media, then hit the plug with carb or brake cleaner and just shake off the excess. Once the plugs are dry, you can inspect the porcelain with a magnifying glass. What you are looking for are any cracks or chips in the porcelain. Once they pass inspection, it time to clean up the electrodes and set the spark plug gap. Any rounded edges of the electrodes should be filed back to a sharp line. I find that a triangle modeling file is the perfect size for this. With that done, you set the gap just like a new plug. Now some of you might have a car setup that just about kills you to change plugs in it. In these cases you may decide to just put new plugs in for all the trouble it is and I don't blame you a bit. Most of my vehicles aren't that difficult to change plugs on so I don't mind saving the cost of a new set by cleaning up the old ones. And on my drag cars, it's part of the weekly maintenance routine. I can race an entire season on one set of copper core plugs just by cleaning them. And normally once a year, the mowers, weed eater, chainsaw, etc all get their plugs blasted, filed and gapped. When I was just starting out as a hot rodder, a set of Champion plugs - 10 to a box was $5.00 or 50 cents a plug. The normal price around here now for a standard spark plug is $3.00 each. That's $24 for a set of eight plugs. We race 4 cars an average of 30 races a season so that's right at $3000 a year just in spark plugs, assuming we would change them for each event. A spark plug blaster at HR is about $17 and a pound of media is $7 so $24 for the tool. And over 15 years so far, I have only changed the media in my blaster one time.

A plug blaster probably isn't for everyone but if you want to save some money and be able to keep that small block Chevy running really crisp, it's not a bad tool to have around.