>On a side note, I hope whoever designed the engine compartment has to
>spend eternal punishment changing spark plugs in that model. With the
>big block in it, the #7 and 8 spark plugs were a royal bitch to change
>because of the air conditioner compressor was right above them.

Oh, that reminds me—during our last work session on the Impala, my father told me about a car a friend of his had back in the '60s. I forget now what it was, a Ford of some description, I think, but upshot of the story is that the factory did that thing they used to do in those days and made one of the huge truck engines available in a small car if you knew the right guy at the right dealership who knew the right secret code to order it with. (For those who don't know, this was sort of the proto-muscle car thing, before the manufacturers specifically marketed them that way.)

The trouble was, the car's engine bay was never designed to have an engine that big in it, and they only barely got it to fit—and only after it had been on the market for a while did anyone realize that it was physically impossible to remove the spark plugs on one of the cylinder banks (the one on the passenger side, if memory serves). Not only couldn't you get at them, there wasn't enough clearance to take them out even if you somehow managed to unscrew them. The first set was installed at the factory before the engine was put in the car, and evidently no one thought to try changing them.

Unfortunately, back in those days spark plugs had to be taken out and cleaned fairly regularly, especially in high-performance engines, so once the first cohort of customers had had their cars for a few thousand miles, they suddenly discovered that they couldn't get the righthand plugs out without pulling the engine out of the car. This was not a popular feature.

Ford's response to this was to recall all the cars sold with that engine, cut a hole in the inner fender, and fit the hole with a sort of bolt-in hatch cover, then put the car back together and return it to the customer. With that modification in place, the official procedure for changing the plugs on the right side was to put the car up on a lift, remove the wheel, slither up in around the suspension (or take it off), unbolt the hatch in the inner fender, and take the plugs out via the wheel well through the hole.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this wasn't popular either, but, well, what're you gonna do. Early adopters have to live with this stuff. :)

(Daft designs like this still persist. My mother's 2009 Cadillac SRX had a similar feature; in that case, you had to put it up on a lift and remove the wheel and inner fender to replace a failed HID headlight element. This, I'm fairly sure, was less an oversight like the above case, and more GM's engineers being instructed to make some business for the dealers.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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