bertsmobile1
Lawn Royalty
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2014
- Threads
- 64
- Messages
- 24,705
One of the good things about being born into a dirt poor family is you get forced to work in all sorts of places.
One of them was the Champion factory in Sydney which was here to make plugs for British Leyland., General Motors & Ford.
To my surprise they made every brand of spark plug.
They all came out of the same machines.
Apparently in Melbourne the spark plug factory there did the same & supplied Ford & Toyota
Why ?
Because 50 years ago the profits in making spark plugs were less than the freight cost shifting them 1000 km.
Now back then a spark plug was around an hours wages and the machine made them all we did was to feed in the raw materials & pack the different brand plugs into different cartons.
Fifty years on and a spark plug is about 10 minutes wages and everything that gets feed into the machine has gone up in price by several factors of 10 so the profit in a plug would be lucky to be 1¢ a plug.
The machine that makes them tests each & every plug and from the results the plugs got graded and dropped into different stillages to go into the next machine which printed the name & grade on the plug.
All it takes is the wrong stillage to be feed into the printer and you get a full batch of bad plugs.
Add to that NGK's no longer are glazed on the nose to reduce the Pb emissions from the engine , then factor in that new "fuels" are conductive at combustion pressures and you have the receipe for mass plug failure.
Because there is so little profit in std plugs, the plug factories really don't care about them as all the profit is in the rare metal $ 20 to $ 50 plugs.
So they loose money on standard plugs in order to make big profits on the exotic plugs.
Several years latter I was weekend manager at a car wash / petrol station.
The workshop was leased out to a mechanic who did mainly muscle cars as the site had a dyno.
He had a plug tester and would open a dozen or more plug boxes testing each one till he got a matched set of 8, tossing each "dud" plug in the bin ( while the customer was watching ).
latter the apprentice would clean & regap the "dud" plugs & put them back in their boxes.
Thus I have no brand loyality when it comes to plugs, it is just I understand NGK's naming system quit well so can pop a slightly hotter plug in an engine that is starting to burn oil & foul.
What I did learn was the best plugs went into the single branded boxes and the worst plugs went into the 4,6 or 8 plug bubble packs with the big box stores brand name on them.
One of them was the Champion factory in Sydney which was here to make plugs for British Leyland., General Motors & Ford.
To my surprise they made every brand of spark plug.
They all came out of the same machines.
Apparently in Melbourne the spark plug factory there did the same & supplied Ford & Toyota
Why ?
Because 50 years ago the profits in making spark plugs were less than the freight cost shifting them 1000 km.
Now back then a spark plug was around an hours wages and the machine made them all we did was to feed in the raw materials & pack the different brand plugs into different cartons.
Fifty years on and a spark plug is about 10 minutes wages and everything that gets feed into the machine has gone up in price by several factors of 10 so the profit in a plug would be lucky to be 1¢ a plug.
The machine that makes them tests each & every plug and from the results the plugs got graded and dropped into different stillages to go into the next machine which printed the name & grade on the plug.
All it takes is the wrong stillage to be feed into the printer and you get a full batch of bad plugs.
Add to that NGK's no longer are glazed on the nose to reduce the Pb emissions from the engine , then factor in that new "fuels" are conductive at combustion pressures and you have the receipe for mass plug failure.
Because there is so little profit in std plugs, the plug factories really don't care about them as all the profit is in the rare metal $ 20 to $ 50 plugs.
So they loose money on standard plugs in order to make big profits on the exotic plugs.
Several years latter I was weekend manager at a car wash / petrol station.
The workshop was leased out to a mechanic who did mainly muscle cars as the site had a dyno.
He had a plug tester and would open a dozen or more plug boxes testing each one till he got a matched set of 8, tossing each "dud" plug in the bin ( while the customer was watching ).
latter the apprentice would clean & regap the "dud" plugs & put them back in their boxes.
Thus I have no brand loyality when it comes to plugs, it is just I understand NGK's naming system quit well so can pop a slightly hotter plug in an engine that is starting to burn oil & foul.
What I did learn was the best plugs went into the single branded boxes and the worst plugs went into the 4,6 or 8 plug bubble packs with the big box stores brand name on them.