My girlfriend has a '98 Neon with the SOHC engine with just over 80K miles on it. Well, its been running fine but it has has really bad preignition, especially with the air conditioning on. It also has really weak acceleration but I figured that was probably due to the 3 speed auto/ 4 cylinder combo and I'm spoiled with my 4.0l Cherokee with a lot of bolt-ons. Anyway, we were down at my parents' house yesterday and I pulled one of the spark plugs to see what kind of condition they were in and they looked new but they had oil all over them. WTF? Is the valve cover gasket leaking? I don't know much about OHC engines, I'm used to the 4.0l on my Jeep. Her car seems to be in pretty good condition other than this, its had a recent tune up and had the the head gasket replaced, the timing belt changed, and the A/C recharged. I also need to pull the receipts on it to see what all was done in the tune up last year, it was right before i met her. The spark plug wires appeared to be new Mopar wires, but they could be original since her engine is really clean. Also, I couldn't find a distributor anywhere on it? Do they have distributorless ignition?

Sorry for all the Newb questions, I'm pretty decent working on cars, I just dont know crap about Neons.

 

So I did a search on another board after I came up with nothing on my search here and apparenly there is a spark plug tube that goes bad and allows oil onto the spark plugs.

 

oil on the plugs/in the plug tubes can come from one of two areas:
the base of the plug tube, may lose its seal and allow oil to get in there.. if thats where the leak is at, then yeah you gotta follow that pic you posted.

but.. 90% of the time, the culprit is the spark plug tube seals.. these are the seals that seal the tubes against the valve cover. check and replace those before replacing the tubes themselves, as this is the most common problem and usually the fix. may also want to replace the valve cover gasket at the same time.

nope, the neon has no distributor. makes life simple huh?

 

I would also say the gaskets, but if the oil is not at the top of the plug at all, then its probally the tubes.

 

Thanks for the replies, that sounds logical. So, is this the pretty straight forward job it appears to be or is there anything I need to know? Any special tricks or anything?
Thanks

 

I had the same problem with my neon.....oil on spark plugs....got the valve gasket changed..now all is ok......sould be resolved with the valve gasket change....

 

So I took the car to the dealer to get it fixed. Its my girlfriend's car and we both live in apartments so I have nowhere to work on it. I couldn't believe how much it cost to get it fixed. They replaced the spark plug tubes and the gaskets and it cost $500, $420 of it was labor. I think she got ripped off, it didnt seem like that involved of a job. It pisses me off that they charged a diagnostic fee when I told them what was wrong with it and they confirmed that was it. Luckily, since shes in grad school her parents picked up the bill.

It runs better and seems to have a little more power. Its still getting some preignition when the A/C is on, but im thinking that might be due to the fact that she deals with a lot of traffic and its carboned up inside. I redlined it 0-100 getting on the interstate to hopefully clean some of the crap out of it since she drives it like an old lady and it seems to be running better now. I was also thinking maybe the fuel injectors might need to be cleaned. Its only got 80K on it and its had a recent tune up and head gasket. It runs great without the A/C on.

 

The car does learn how you drive to a certain extent. If you drive it like an old lady, its gonna drive like an old ladys car. If you drive it aggresivly it is gonna learn to drive aggresivly, so some degree.

 

Adaptive strategy is the technical term - neural network programming algorithms for you computer geeks . Computers that learn - scary **** if you ask me. And dude - why did you take your car to the dealer? you def got ripped and there are plenty of good independent mechanics that know the neon backwards and forwards. If you want to get around the computers learning curve you can just erase its memory - kind of like you or I smoking a few tubes - jk - just disconnect the battery for a minute or so, you can do this in your driveway I hope, to bleed the capicitors in the puter, its just a jumbled mess of RC circuitry so give it a some time and you should be back to a nice to some nice fresh ram ready to learn again... As for your A/C issues, i highly doubt this would solve them and the knocks you are hearing are most likely not at the frequency of a "harmful" knock or the computer would retard the timing to prevent this - only a very narrow band of frequencies are considered harmful to an engine and most likely yours puter uses a band-pass filter to amplify them but thats more than anyone needs to know. If you are really worried about it have your girl use some higher octane gasoline, after you have reset the ecu of course. I have no doubt that if the car has been dogged around all its life that you have some nasty lookin combustion chambers and piston faces but if the tech that replaced the head gasket had half a brain or any pride in his work he woulda cleaned that **** off while he had it apart. And if I were replacing a head gasket you can bet your *** I woulda had the head milled - this raises the compression ratio - find out if they did that and if so I would def recommend running the next highest octane rating....good luck.

 

or pull the 20amp fuel pump fuse instead