"Magic" spark plug. Anybody seen this?
 

Here's the link.

https://fueleconomytips.com/2005/10/28/spark-plug-magic/

It's not a commercial product, it's a mod done to stock plugs. In a nutshell, you're supposed to dish the center electrode tip in a drill press, then drill a lil hole through the ground electrode. They call it the pencil torch plug.

Anybody messed with this?

Oh, btw, hi everybody. :D

link doesn't work:thumbdown:

Looks once more like one of those things supposed to give a faster burn to the combustion chamber, which if it does, can only be useful with a retard in timing.
And from what I remember (from a debunking of things like the intake vortex or other gadgets) the gains would be fairly minimal.

Ya, but I liked the part about how it works like a satellite dish. :-)

Heck, maybe I'll try it. It's not like they are trying to sell something, it's a free diy mod. Besides, I only have 3 to do it to so it won't take too much effort :) . Indexing the plugs alone might make some difference.

I would be somewhat concerned about the tip of the electrode breaking off and falling into the combustion chamber.

Q

I thought about that too...

Seems like another one of those mods which might show gains on, say, some smog era engine with low compression and crappy heads.

I thought about the disintegrating ground electrode issue myself. If you drill the hole small enough to leave plenty meat on the electrode to assure its integrity, then I'd guess that pinhole would carbon up PDQ. Side gapping and filing back the electrode seems just as likely to turn the same trick, without the risk of little metal bits getting ground into the cylinder walls.

I'd like to see a test fire pic of a spark from one of these modified plugs before putting time and effort into screwing up a perfectly good set of new plugs.
From what I remember of high voltage behavior, spherical shapes retain a charge, while ones with corners and sharp points release it at the edge or tip of the point. This can be seen in the occurance of St. Elmo's Fire, where coronal discharge creates visible plasma at the ends of pointed objects such as ships' masts. That's also why lightning rods are pointed... They're not designed to channel lightning strikes, but to dissipate the difference in charge between the ground and clouds so lightning is less likely to strike in that area. The pointed tip provides the least restrictive path for dissapation of static charge.
Point being, if you dished the insulated electrode, you would create a dead area in it's center, with a hot ring around the edge of the dish. That would go nicely with the dead spot left by the hole in the ground electrode, but I fail to see how it would create torch or jet effect.

I've not tried it, but I have read about it before. My theory was that the gains from this mod would be similar to the same gains you get from indexing your plugs (since both this mod and indexing aim to control how the fire from the spark enters the chamber). And since indexing is easier to do (and doesn't cause the plug to wear out as fast), I went with the indexing approach.

OTOH until someone does a "side by side" test, we really won't know which is better (indexing or this plug mod). My personal guess is that indexing will get pretty much all the gains this mod would, but at the present time that is just an educated guess (as I don't know of anyone who has "run the experiment" to find out for sure).

If it helps, I once tried the Halo spark plug. A salesman for the company came onto the performance forum I post on looking to hawk some. When there were no takers, he offered to send someone a free set to try, and he had the bad luck to accept me as a test buggy. With no other changes to my driving in a 2000 S10 Blazer 2dr 2WD I lost about 3MPG, started having drivability problems and wasn't as fast as it was with regular copper plugs. And boy did he get a review! First he said that my driving style (80MPH everywhere) was why his plugs didn't improve mileage, but then I also posted that putting a set of standard plugs returned my mileage and power, and the drivability problems disappeared. He disappeared, too. I did send him the plugs back though, since they were for testing only.

The problem is, the little spark doesn't turn into a large ball of fire that expands outward, the spark goes from the tip to the electrode, and ignites the fuel to the sides. All the round electrode did was cause the spark to hit in different places rather than one place, which means it had an irregular spark.

On this little mod, considering the electrode wears a little bit with every spark, it won't take long unti it cuts the tip off. A better plug mod is to cut the tip sides down, making a more pointed element to better control where the spark hits. This does not cut off a huge part of the tip, but does mean the plug will wear faster.