Working on Cars

People who work on cars have my deepest respect. I do a lot of my own maintenance and repairs, but I have my limitations. I was just working on the replaceing a leaky valve cover gasket, and I was fully intent on just doing that and leaving the plugs alone, but the gasket was faulty around one of the cylinders, so oil was in there and it was pretty gunked up. So, I drive to the store and get replacement plugs. No big deal. But, when I tried to get out the other plugs, they didn’t want to come out. I’ve done plugs many times, and I’ve never run into this. Maybe one will sometimes be more difficult, but they always come out without too much fuss. This time, the three remaining cylinders were stuck, and I fought with them all morning, and I broke one of them off. Yep. The others stripped. So, I’ve got one working cylinder.When I compared the old plugs to the replacements, the old ones were about half-inch longer, so when I replaced the plugs when I first bought this car, I just went up to autozone and got the replacements, and I didn’t check them against the old ones, because they just threaded in fine. Big mistake. Now I know why you should always check the parts before you install them.