Under the Hood

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

If you've ever owned a 4Runner past a hundred and fifty thousand miles, you already know the one job that makes a grown man set his coffee down and just stare at the engine. It isn't the timing belt. It isn't the water pump. It's six spark plugs. And it's the reason a basic maintenance job can turn into an afternoon of bloody knuckles and every extension you own scattered across the garage floor. I'm Glenn. The 4Runner in my garage is a 2015 SR5 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 truck 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 the 4.0. The V6 sits in a bay Toyota packed tight, and then they stacked the secondary air injection equipment right on top of the plugs, hoses and brackets running across everything you need to get at. The passenger side you can work with. The driver's side you cannot. The worst one, the middle plug on the driver's side, sits down in a slot behind the hoses 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 four misfire. I knew what it was. Plugs were past due at a hundred thirty. I'd been quietly putting off the driver's side since the day I bought the truck. So I started in on it on a Saturday. Intake tubing off, air injection lines 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 a bracket, and five degrees is nothing on a plug that's been in since the factory. A universal joint bound up and twisted off the hex every time I leaned on it. A magnetic socket I bought at the parts store wobbled like a paper fan. Three hours in I'd turned that plug maybe a quarter of the way out, five degrees at a time, and I had a knuckle wrapped in a shop rag and two plugs on the driver's side I hadn't touched yet. I sat down on the garage stool and listened to the whole noon hour on the radio without moving. Monday I called the Toyota dealer in Bend. The service writer told me the driver's side was where the labor went, working around all that air injection equipment to get a socket onto three plugs. A thousand and fifty dollars, give or take, for six 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, "A thousand 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 out to the big 4Runner 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 trucks down from me a fellow about seventy had a 2010 4Runner with two hundred and sixty thousand on it and a tool chest in the back. We got to talking about the misfire. He listened to the whole thing, the five-degree swings, 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 round it. You put the working end down in the hole and you keep the ratchet up where you've got room to swing it. The only reason that driver's side 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 4Runner, slid the bar down past the hoses into the gap where my hand wouldn't fit, set the socket on my half-out cylinder-four plug, put a ratchet on the end where there was room, and handed it to me. "Your truck. You pull it." It seated flat and came loose on the first pull. No walk. No rounding. I did all six that afternoon in the field, and I never pulled a single piece of that air injection equipment off the truck. 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 a thousand and fifty at the dealer, every plug change for the rest of the truck'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 truck to a stranger over three spark plugs he can see with a flashlight. I've used it a couple dozen times since. Valve cover bolts back against the firewall. Alternator and bracket bolts where a ratchet has nowhere to swing. Skid plate and crossmember bolts on Carol's brother's Tacoma. It lives on top of the chest now, where I can reach it. If you run a 4.0 in a 4Runner, a Tacoma, or an FJ Cruiser, you already know the plugs I'm talking about. The driver's side. The dealer quote. You don't have to pay a thousand 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