Under the Hood

I almost paid the dealer $1,050 to change six spark plugs.

A shop wanted $500 to change eight spark plugs in my Corvette. I asked how eight spark plugs could possibly cost that much. The plugs themselves were $80. He said, “It's not the plugs. It's getting to the ones at the back.” I figured he was exaggerating. Three hours into doing it myself, I realized he wasn't. Then another Corvette owner showed me something I wish I'd owned twenty years ago. Let me back up. I'm Glenn. The Corvette in my garage is a 2002 with a hundred and thirty thousand miles on it, and I've done almost every one of those miles myself. I'm no mechanic. I spent thirty years running land surveys up and down the Cascades, and that car is how I got to half the ridgelines in central Oregon. It's paid off. It starts at nine degrees. My wife Carol quit asking when I'd replace it about fifty thousand miles ago. I keep it running because keeping it running is the whole point. Here's what nobody tells you about an LS1. The engine sits back so far the rear plugs end up against the firewall, an inch and a half of air between the plug and a solid steel bulkhead. The front six you can reach. The back two you cannot. The worst one, number seven, the rear plug on the driver's side, sits buried behind the air plumbing and the brackets, where your hand goes in and your knuckles come out bleeding. Last fall I picked up a stumble on the climb out of Sisters, a little buck under load that turned into a check-engine light by the time I got home. Code said cylinder seven misfire. I knew what it was. Plugs were past due at a hundred thirty. I'd been quietly putting off the back two since the day I bought the car. So I started in on it on a Saturday. Seven plugs out, air hose moved aside, coil unbolted. 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 off the hex. A stubby flex-head ratchet 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 plug every time I leaned on it. A double-swivel socket I bought on somebody's advice wobbled like a paper fan. Two hours in I had socket, extension, swivel and another extension stacked up behind that plug and a knuckle wrapped in a shop rag, and I sat down on the garage stool and listened to the whole noon hour on the radio without moving. Monday I called the Chevy dealer in Bend. The service writer told me the back driver's-side plug was where all the labor went, working a socket into a space nobody's hand fits into. Most of a day of book time. Five hundred dollars, give or take, for eight spark plugs. He said it the way you'd read off a weather report. I told Carol at supper. She put her fork down and said, "Five hundred dollars to change spark plugs. No. They're making it harder than it is." She was right. They were. A few weeks later I drove up to the big Corvette meet they hold every summer, the one where two hundred people park with their hoods up and spend the afternoon under each other's engines drinking gas-station coffee. Three cars down from me a fellow about seventy had a 1999 C5 with two hundred and sixty thousand on it and a tool chest in the back. We got to talking about the misfire. I said number seven. He said, "Rear driver's side?" and I didn't have to say anything else. He listened to the whole thing, the stack of extensions, 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 chest 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 walk off it. The only reason number seven is a dealer job is there's no room to swing a ratchet at it. Nothing to do with the plug. It's the room." He walked over to my Corvette, slid the bar down past the plumbing into the gap where my hand wouldn't fit, set the socket on my cylinder-seven plug, put a ratchet on the end where there was room, and handed it to me. "Your car. You pull it." It seated flat and broke loose on the first pull. No walk. No stack. I did both back plugs that afternoon in the field, gapped and torqued, nothing pulled off the car to do it. He 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 from their own site, wildbeartools.com. Eighty-nine dollars. Eighty-nine dollars against five hundred at the dealer, every plug change for the rest of the car's life. It paid for itself before I left the field. But that's not really why it stays on my bench. It stays there because a man who's done a hundred and thirty thousand miles of his own work shouldn't have to hand his car to a stranger over one spark plug he can see with a flashlight. I've used it a couple dozen times since. Accessory bracket bolts. Fasteners tucked against the firewall. Anywhere I can get a socket onto the bolt but can't get a ratchet in behind it. It lives on top of the chest now, where I can reach it. If you run an LS1 or an LS6 in a C5, you already know the plug I'm talking about. Number seven. Rear driver's side. You don't have to pay a shop five hundred dollars just because you can't get a ratchet in there. The maker sells direct from their own site, not Amazon, not the dealer. The knockoffs look the same. They don't have the chain. They don't work. https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench