Ok my daughter was driving the other day and the car blew a heater hose. She had enough sense to pull over and shut the car down. I had it towed to the house and replaced the heater hose that comes from the firewall to the block under the distributor. I had to remove the distributor to access the hose clamps. All went well. I reinstalled everything making sure the alignment on the distributor cam link stayed in the same position and also replaced the oring on the distributor. I took it for a test spin around the block to check for leaks and everything looked great so she took off in it to babysit. She called on her way back and said the car was sputtering. She got it home and I went out to check it out and found it to obviously be misfiring. I figured some water/antifreeze must have gotten into some of the sensor plugs so I removed them and cleaned with CRC. Still misfiring. I checked the antifreeze, plug connections and distributor cap and rotor. The cap and rotor looked worn so I figured to replace them if I couldn't find anything else. After scratching my head for most of the afternoon I drove it to Advance Auto and put the code checker to it. The codes were what I suspected, misfires in #1 & #3 and another for multiple misfires. Sorry didn't write them down. I bought a new cap and rotor and a set of new plugs. I went to pull the plug caps out and they wouldn't budge. In fact, I wound up pulling out the plug wire from one trying to remove it. SO I guess I'll need a set of them too. What I found when I finally got one removed is that the plastic plug boot had melted around the base of the plug!

Has anyone ever had this happen? If so, how did you get those suckers out?? This is a real pain! Help! I still haven't figured out why its misfiring!

 

Well it seems it might have gotten hotter than suspected.

Pull all of the wires.....of course remember the order.....the ones that "brake" off....see if you can get a socket on them, if not use a throw away screw driver and gently use it the break of the rest of the plug wire.

Once you can get a socket on the plug, use a shop vac to get as much of the broken pieces out of the tubes as you can.

Remove and replace the plugs and install the new wires and see what you have from there

 

Yeah that's what I figured. I ran out of daylight so I'll have to hit it again on Weds when I'm off in the AM. Thanks for the tip.

 

Any updates....it is Thursday

 

I really have to wonder if somehow you got the distributor shaft 180 degrees even though you said you tried to make sure it was straight. No insult intended.

 

Haha, well I got really busy this week. My daughter has been borrowing my wife's car since her's went down so I took off work today to fix it. Man was it a real PITA . I got them all out though. I did some further research on this site and kind of gleaned from everyone's wisdom that's had to do this. For me the "carefully drill the pieces so they would break up easier" didn't work well. My drill bit was long enough but it just seemed a bit sketchy so I stopped after the first one didn't seem to do much to help. What I wound up doing is taking my long flat blade screwdriver and tapping it down to cut the melted pieces into several chunks. I then used a homemade hook to get under the pieces and work them up over the bottom of the plug so I could vacuum them out. To do that I attached about a foot long piece of 1/2"OD flexible electrical conduit to the end of my vacuum hose with electrical tape. Then I cut the tip at about a 45 degree angle so it could get some air when it was in the hole. It worked great. The first one was where the learning curve took place and took me about an hour just to figure out what tools I was going to work with to accomplish the job. I did wind up breaking the ceramic on the plug but I made sure I got all the pieces all out before removing the plug itself. After the first one the rest went pretty smoothly but it was still a pain. They were in there too. Amazing how they melted.

Anyhow, after that I replaced the plugs, plug wires and cap and rotor and fired her up. Runs smooth and strong. No lights or hesitation and purring like a kitten at idle. All in all it was a good lesson. Hope this helps someone else. Below are photos of the tools I used and some of the crap I took out of the spark plug recesses. The rest of it is in the vacuum. Thanks for everyone's comments.

 

None taken. Once I slept on it I realized that it would be misfiring if the plug boots had melted allowing the spark to arc from the exposed wires to the valve cover. It kind of was a no brainer after thinking on it.

As for the distributor, I made sure the mark on the shaft was lined up exactly as I removed it. Thanks for your input. If folks get torqued because someone's trying to help, then they don't need to ask any question. Just my 2 cents.

 

Me, I'm just glad you got it going again