Spark Plug Screw Terminals - An Old Dog

vibrac

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VOC Member
Searching for spark plugs to cure a non Vincent problem I went for some Champion plugs (not my normal choice but NGK seem to be slipping nowadays) I had already dispensed with plug caps as I struggled to get a decent spark so I was screwing the leads onto the terminals. There I was blithely, as I have done for decades unscrewing the terminal nuts on the plugs and.... they fell apart in my hands! the terminals were screwed into the ceramics! then I looked at the details on the net and hidden under the additional information tab I saw the words "Fixed terminals", then looking closly at the ends of the terminal"nuts" (that looked like they always have) I could see they were one piece and not on a screwed terminal thread.Can engineers never keep the bean counters at bay?
anyway that's a new trick learnt.
 

BigEd

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VOC Forum Moderator
Searching for spark plugs to cure a non Vincent problem I went for some Champion plugs (not my normal choice but NGK seem to be slipping nowadays) I had already dispensed with plug caps as I struggled to get a decent spark so I was screwing the leads onto the terminals. There I was blithely, as I have done for decades unscrewing the terminal nuts on the plugs and.... they fell apart in my hands! the terminals were screwed into the ceramics! then I looked at the details on the net and hidden under the additional information tab I saw the words "Fixed terminals", then looking closly at the ends of the terminal"nuts" (that looked like they always have) I could see they were one piece and not on a screwed terminal thread.Can engineers never keep the bean counters at bay?
anyway that's a new trick learnt.
I think I have seen these. Solid end. i.e. You can not see an internal thread/
 

ClassicBiker

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VOC Member
Vibrac, to answer your question. No, I'm afraid bean counters are a little like the mythical hydra, as soon as you knock one off, two more appear. I can remember 30 years back when work on contract to Daimler/Chrysler as a dimensional control engineer doing analysis of body in white tolerance on the mini van. Management, all bean counters, said there would be no new, tooling, no new processes. The new vehicle would use the same locators in the assembly tooling, the assembly process would be the same and done on the same line as the old product. We were then told they expected "Toyota level quality", they never quantified what that was, from the new vehicle.
My manager's manager wanted to know how long it would take to do a full body analysis of the new vehicle. I told him about 30 minutes. As all I needed to do was change the names on the files from the old product to the new. Same locators, same tools, same results. He didn't understand what I was driving at.
 
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