Learned a trick for freeing stuck glow plugs on an old Cummins 5.9

Last month I was fighting a set of stuck glow plugs in a 1996 Dodge Ram 2500 with the 5.9L. Spent two hours with penetrating oil and a breaker bar getting nowhere. Then my buddy who works at a shop in Tulsa told me to heat the injector boss area with a propane torch for about 90 seconds before trying again. Popped right out after that never had an issue. Anyone else tried heating the block around stubborn plugs or do you use a different method?

3 comments

3 Comments

grantadams17d ago

My buddy wrecked one of those heads doing that with a torch... ended up with a crack that leaked coolant into the cylinder. I'd rather drill and easy-out them or just pull the head and take it to a machine shop instead of risking that heat.

julia_lee17d ago

Man I swear this is exactly how things go for me too. Its like every time I try to shortcut something around the house it ends up costing me twice as much time and money in the long run. Last week I tried to fix a leaky pipe with some epoxy and now I got water damage in the ceiling. Same principle with those bolts if you rush it youll end up with a cracked head and a smoldering wallet. Sometimes the right way really is the boring way.

margaretm2313d ago

Have you ever had the opposite thing happen, though, where you take the long boring way and it turns out you wasted your time anyway? I'm not saying shortcuts always work, but there's a middle ground here. I've watched people drop a ton of money on machine shop work for a simple bolt extraction that could've been done carefully with a torch and some patience. The key is knowing when a shortcut is actually just good sense versus when it's pure laziness.