Basically I have been hearing ticking for sometime. I assume it was the injectors maybe one went bad. Then fairly recently one day it sounded like a bent valve or some other horrible mechanical noise. It stopped after a couple minutes and it went back to ticking. on the ride home it missed a couple times and felt like it was losing power, then it felt ok again. Well recently it started misfiring sometimes. on 3 ocassions it blinked the check engine light at me, so I then assumed i needed new coils. Well i found a coil today and decided to try swapping it out for the coils on the rear bank where i heard the ticking from. the first 2 from the passenger fender resulted in no change but the third plug (the one closes to the throttle body on the rear bank) was not tight and all covered in oil. When i removed it essentially the side electrode was gone.

Essentially I got another plug and threw it in and put everything back together ticking is gone but I am not sure what happened to the side electrode? Is it possible it could have made its way into the exhaust?

 

probably gone at this point. if it wasn't chewed up by the engine- doing not-so-nice things to the piston, head, and valves in the process, then it's probably stuck in front of the cat. either way the damage is done.. put new plugs in and hope the engine didn't suffer major damage.

 

Should i do a compression test or something?

 

I think you should be more worried about why you're getting detonation. Try to figure out what was going on inside that cylinder to cause that kind of damage to a plug. Then do a compression test.

 

I should have mentioned. I threw in another plug and different coil pack and put everything back together and it runs fine. I am just worried about where the side electorde went and what is the worst case?

 

Some one already answered this

 

Well i am looking for some advice on what i should do? Should i do anything?

 

Not if its running fine, lol. Check compression to make sure the cylinder wall on that chamber isn't scorred (sp*) or a valve is bent (either way, a spark plug electrode wont bend a valve, but it MAY scratch the heck out of the valve's mating surface against the head if it got caught there). If its fine, then your fine, if its significantly lower compression in that cylinder, then you have damage to worry about. Keep in mind a 10psi difference bet'n cylinders is perfectly fine.