Bob the Plumber

$400 to change six spark plugs on my own Jeep. Three of them I could touch with one finger.

If you’ve ever owned a Jeep Wrangler past a hundred thousand miles, you already know the one job that makes a grown man set down his coffee and just stare at the back of the engine. It isn’t the water pump. It isn’t the oil cooler. It’s three spark plugs. And it’s the reason a dealer can look you in the eye and charge you four hundred dollars for a part that costs forty. I’m Bob. The Wrangler in my driveway is a 2014 JK with the 3.6 Pentastar and a hundred and forty thousand miles on it, and I’ve done nearly every one of those miles myself. I’m no mechanic. I ran heavy equipment for the county up around Montrose for twenty-eight years. I keep that Jeep running because keeping it running is the whole point. Here’s what nobody tells you about the Pentastar. Six cylinders, six plugs. The front three, up by the radiator, you can reach from the top standing in your own driveway, ten minutes apiece. The back three sit against the firewall, down behind the intake and the cowl, where you can put a flashlight on them and lay a finger on the nearest one and not get a tool to swing an inch. Last spring I picked up a stumble pulling the grade up toward Cerro Summit, a buck under throttle that turned into a check-engine light by the time I got home. Cylinder five misfire. Plugs were past due anyway. I’d been quietly putting off the back three since I don’t know when. So I started in on it on a Saturday. Battery out, intake tube off, got down against the firewall where the rear coils live. I could see the plug. I could touch it with one finger. I could not get a tool on it and turn it. A swivel socket on two extensions flexed under load and walked right off the hex. A stubby flex-head had maybe five degrees of swing before the handle hit the firewall, and five degrees is nothing on a plug that’s been in since the factory. A universal joint bound up and twisted off the head every time I leaned on it. A magnetic socket wobbled like a paper fan. Three hours in I’d rounded the corner of that back plug and wrapped a knuckle in a shop rag, and I sat down on an upturned bucket in the driveway and listened to the whole afternoon go by without moving. Monday I called the Jeep dealer in Montrose. The service writer told me the back three meant loosening the intake and working half-blind down against the firewall, and they’d want the better part of an hour of book time on top of the rounded plug. Four hundred dollars, give or take, for six spark plugs. He said it the way you’d read off a weather report. I told my wife Kathy at supper. She set her fork down and said, “Four hundred dollars to change spark plugs, and you’ve been doing your own tune-ups since we were dating? No. They’re making it harder than it is.” She was right. They were. A few weeks later I ran down to the big Jeep show they hold every spring, the kind where a couple hundred rigs park with their hoods up and everybody spends the day crawling under each other’s trucks drinking gas-station coffee. Two rows over a fellow about seventy had a high-mile JK with a toolbox bolted in the back and more Rubicon trail stickers than paint. We got to talking. He listened to the whole thing — the rounded plug, the dealer quote, all of it. Then he said, “You ever use a chain bar?” I told him I didn’t know what that was. He reached into the box and handed me a flat blue bar about the length of my forearm. Told me to press my thumb on the end. Something turned inside it. Not a wobble, not a hinge. A chain, sealed in the bar. “The chain carries the turn around the corner,” he said. “It stays dead square on the plug, so it can’t rock and round it. The only reason those back three are a dealer job is there’s no room to swing a ratchet. Nothing to do with the plug. It’s the room.” I went home and got down against the firewall that same afternoon. Slid the bar past the cowl into the gap where my hand wouldn’t fit, set the socket on my rounded plug, put a ratchet on the far end where there was room. It seated flat and broke loose on the first pull. No walk. No rounding. I did all three back there before supper, no intake pulled, no dealer in it. Eighty-nine dollars against four hundred at the dealer, every plug change for the life of the Jeep. It paid for itself before I’d closed the hood. But that’s not really why it lives on my bench now. It lives there because a man who’s done a hundred and forty thousand miles of his own work shouldn’t have to hand his truck to a stranger over three plugs he can see with a flashlight. I’ve used it a couple dozen times since. The oil filter housing bolts everybody on the forums warns you about. A starter bolt down behind the block the book says needs half the intake off. A buddy’s Grand Cherokee with the same back three. It lives in the top of the chest now, where I can reach it. If you run a 3.6 Pentastar in a JK Wrangler, a Grand Cherokee, a Gladiator, or a Ram, you already know the plugs I’m talking about. The back three. The dealer job. You don’t have to pay for it, and you don’t have to pull the intake. The fellow told me to order it from the people who make it, not off Amazon, where they sell bars that look the same but have a universal joint inside instead of a chain. Without the chain it just flexes, same as the two hundred dollars of tools already in my drawer. The maker sells direct from their own site. The knockoffs look the same. They don’t have the chain. They don’t work. Drop the name of whoever taught you to turn a wrench below. Mine was my old man, in a dirt driveway with a drop light. I’m still at it because of him. https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench