3/12/00You see them advertised all the time. Small, cheap little sand blasters designed to clean one spark plug at a time. "Save money by cleaning your old dirty plugs" they say, yea right! What do you save? 2 bucks? What's the sand blaster cost? At a couple of plugs a year for your mower, how long before you're even? The answer--NEVER!
A number of years back, Briggs did an experiment with spark plug sand blasters. What they found was this. After flushing the core of the test plugs as well as reasonably possible to remove all sand, they broke the plugs open and found on the average, enough sand to lightly coat the surface of a dime. This isn't to say that all of this sand would eventually find it's way back into the engine but the fact is that under compression and shock loads of running and heating/cooling=contraction/expansion of operation, a lot of it will. Would you intentionally toss a load of sand into the cylinder of your engine?
Hey, I know Briggs is in the business of selling engines and parts, but spark plug sales are not a very important part of their sales. Most dealers don't order plugs by the Briggs part #'s so promoting spark plug sales is not their purpose. The reputation of their engines and customer satisfaction is what's important in this case. An engine with sanded piston and cylinder is not warranty regardless of the source of the grit unless it's from a defective air intake seal. Will the maker of that sand blaster assume the engine warranty for the damage their product does? I doubt it, and nor will any engine manufacturer.
When you think of the long term damage that can be caused with the use of a spark plug sand blaster, it's a darn sight cheaper to buy a new spark plug.
LMRM; Bob :<=