yeh so i pulled my plugs today to put some B12 chemtool to remove carbon deposit on the valves in hopes of curing my hard starting problem.

front bank looks good...plugs look a bit ashy but all looked the same...so far so good. I move on the the rear bank and pull off the coil of the rear passenger side and...its coated with OIL. i pull the plugs and its still coated with oil...OIL everywhere!!

is my engine toast?? if not what do i do?? if so what do i do??

please help...

 

Do any of the plugs look like this ?

http://www.gnttype.org/techarea/engine/plugs.html

there is your answer, here is what my plugs look like, one of them is oily

 

all 3 in the front bank are oily and the 4th one i pulled was covered in oil...including the top part that meets the coil.

 

well in that case its probably the o-ring for the spark plug guide tube. Basically your leaking oil from inside the valve covers into the guide tube. should fix it, im pretty damn sure you gotta pull the valve cover to do it. This is for th eon that had oil on the top part which meets the coil.

could you visually see oil if you looked down the tube?

 

yeh i could see oil down the tube. Im gonna do a compression test tomorow and see what that turns up.

 

Spark Plug Tube Seals

 

hmmm...spark plug tube seals then huh... how difficult are these to replace? i assume it involves the removal of the valve covers?

all the plugs had oily threads like the one plug in andrei3333's pic. and they all had ashy white coating on the end. they have approximately 8,000 miles...is this normal?

 

Yea thats normal. The Spark Plug Tube Seals require the Valve cover to be replaced. Ive only really seen problems on there rear bank, for some reason, which requires you remove the upper manifold. Kind of a pain if its your first time doing it. Ive done it about five times on a few different maximas and its cake for me now. If your ok at wrenching, you wont have a problem.

Ive seen it soo bad that the entire tube was filled with oil because the seal fell down the tube alowing oil up and around and in by the spark plug

-matt