SIGNS IN AN ENGINE THAT SHOW THE PLUG HAS GONE BAD
The engine plug is one of the vital parts of an engine that should not be taken for granted, the reason is that the whole parts of an internal combustion engine may be normal and of good quality but with a bad engine plug the engine will become incapacitated.
The lack of knowledge concerning engine plugs has destroyed many engines due to wrong diagnoses by the inexperienced mechanics, a problem in an engine plug can create another problem in another part of the engine.
Engine plugs serve as the heart of the internal combustion engines such that without them the whole engine can not be used for any purpose.
Many manufacturers had tried to make engine plugs more efficient by bringing up different designs to suit their products and make them more efficient than others.
Ranging from creating long threaded plugs to creating short threaded plugs even in modifying the internal designs, the facts still remain that the engine plug of any engine is required to be changed from time to time due to its working principle.
The materials in which engine plugs were made, their working principles, and why engine plugs require changing periodically, shall be topics for another day.
For any internal combustion engines such as electric generators, grinding engines, etc. there are signs they could show it will indicate a failure from the plug or malfunctioning of the plug and these signs are:
DIFFICULTY IN STARTING
Starting an engine is the main focal point of any designer and manufacturer because without starting the engine any fault in the engine may not be able to identify, but this function cannot primarily take place without the plugin of the engine, irrespective of whether the engine is new or old.
A major fault the engine plug gives to the engine is to cause high starting, a situation where the engine experiences difficulty in starting.
The fault is a sign of a decrease in the sparks generated by the plug from the ignition system, the decrease in the sparks will make it difficult for the compressed fuel and air to ignite.
SHOOTING SOUND FROM THE EXHAUST
The shooting sound coming out from the exhaust can be attributed to many problems and the engine plug is one of them.
The engine plug cause shooting at the engine nozzle when it encounters what is referred to as a double stroke, a situation where the plug mixed its time of sparking such that it collides with the time that the next power stroke is about to take place.
Thereby creating a power stroke that is immediately repulsed by the action of the fast-moving piston, the action will lead to a shooting that immediately pushes the carbon mono oxide to the exhaust chamber.
ABNORMAL STOP OF THE ENGINE
The problem of plug that could cause abnormal stopping of the engine is when the two space metals that create the sparks had been covered by accumulated carbon mono oxides.
Such that it starts creating what is known as ‘spark jumping’ a situation where the periodically timed sparking of the engine plug will start missing or being unable to ignite the compressed mixture of fuel and air at some power strokes which are supposed to take place.
But the failures could be compensated by the action of the piston movement which has obtained momentum from the previous stroke.
In a situation where the failure becomes excess such that the piston had lost its momentum of compensating for the failure, the engine will stop at that moment.
A good sign of such fault is that the engine will experience high starting i.e. difficulty in starting again.
UNSTABLE POWER
Another problem which plug could cause is the instability in the power of the engine, the frequent change in sound and power output in the engine.
If the plug starts giving the problem list in the immediate point which is “stopping the engine” the result that could follow it before the engine finally comes to rest is the instability in the power output, such that the sound will be increasing and decreasing according to the power output of the engine.
NOTE; there are other problems that plugs can cause but the chances are very rare so they cannot actually be called plug faults, such problems as overheating, excess release of carbon mono oxide from the engine exhaust nozzles, etc.
