So I go to get an oil change on my 2004 Durango 4.7 (94000 km) last week. No problem. Yesterday I feel what I believe to be a slight miss in it. To be honest I told the owner at the dealership when I bought it it appeared to rough ideal. (shake) He said to bring it in and get a scan. I did not. OOPS No big deal. But today I sense something going on. Today I feel the miss while going to get the wife for lunch. Put it into passing gear and she has a miss. (underpowered)Not real bad but noticeable. The engine light flickers and then goes off. Decide with Christmas coming up and on the road in 2 days travelling to bring it to my Dodge Dealer where I bought the truck. The service manager and I go for a spin. I let him drive. He has a hard time noticing it but does. Especially when I tell him on the highway to quit babying her and giver some gas. We get back and he tells me he will get it looked at and call me this afternoon. His assistant manager calls and tells me it is fixed 1 hour later. This is what the work order said.

Complaint: Engine miss under heavy load. More noticable up hills.

Cause: Scanned for codes.None. Found a one trip failure for #4 cylinder misfire. Test drove with monitor and got 78 misses on #4. Checked and found #4 spark plug hole full of water and and plug rusted.

Correction: Installed a new plug in #4 cylinder. Applied dielectric grease to coil and seal. Test drove. No more misfires.

The durango seems to work fine. It certainly has her pep back and no complaints today.

My question is how does water possibly get into the hole? This can't be good. Why do they need to take it out for a drive if they already know the cylinder? Oh the plug was $5.34 and labour was $79.84 taxes in $99.26.

I asked the assistant manager how the water got into the hole. He asked the mechanic. The mechanic said the water looks like it came from around the windshield arm area. Rain melting snow? I do pressure wash her on occasion. It is very cold and I have plugged the block heater on lately.


Any ideas or answers would be greatly appreciated. Oh LOL my dad said next time get the old plug and talk with the mechanic personally.

Thanks everyone

 

Yes it does happen. If the seal around the coil pack doesn't seal then water leaks down to the spark plug and causes a misfire.

 

I would be careful with pressure washers and would not open the hood and blast away. I use one near my work during the winters a couple times a week to get the salt off my Durango until I can wash it at home. I have never had a problem with it flooding my engine bay and hopefully this is a once in a lifetime occurance,
FF

 

Thanks a lot. I think perhaps water got down the front window into engine with pressure hose. I don't think however if the plug and wires were on properly this would have occured? When people talk about coil pack are they refering to the piece that conects to the top part of the spark plug. Little wire or metal in the spark wire end?

Thanks again. Should I replace all the wires because this happend just to be safe?

 

The coil pack is located on top of the cylinder heads and contain the spark plugs. They pruduce the electric charge for the spark plug to ignite (combust) the fuel mixture in the cylinder,
FF

 

You may also want to look inside the front wheel wells. Now, I'm a little old school and we used to have nice medium-hard rubber flaps that hung down from the wheel well and made contact with the control arms to keep out snow, rain, mud and so on from entering the engine bay.

while the #4 cylinder is pretty far back (probably not the cause for that one) if things are not tight you can/will get the water splashing through there causing issues with the plugs more to the front of the engine.

Exactly what would it have cost Dodge to close up this area anyways? $2.00 per truck? I think all of us would of paid that to avoid this $100.00 a hit problem.