Thread: Storm88000 problems

As usual, the most ridiculous and dumbest thing happened to me again this weekend. Haters come on in.

Since it was 66 degrees yesterday (February in PA its almost unheard of) I decided to do some work on the 98 SE-R. I pulled the valve cover to replace the gasket (word to the wise: don't buy those cheap shitty gaskets from Rock Auto, get OEM or at least something close to OEM, the cheap ones don't always fit 100% properly and can leak).

Anyways, I pulled the valve cover.... oh and by the way, for 202k miles, check how clean this is!




.

But here's what went wrong. While replacing the valve cover, my neighbor showed up and I was talking to him, bullshitting and not paying attention and I accidentally dropped one of the valve cover grommets down into cylinder 3. No problem, I thought, I'll just pull it out with needle nose pliers.... but what actually happened was the grommet fell *DIRECTLY* over the spark plug and settled in down there.

I could NOT get it out. I tried the pliers, a long thin knife, 60 and 90 degree angle picks, thin flat head screwdrivers, telescopic magnets, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Nothing worked, because almost nothing could fit. There's not enough room and the grommet touches the circular walls of the spark plug well - you can't get anything under or to the side to grip and pull it out. These grommets are basically a perfect fit over the spark plug. !!

Also, the grommet is JUST tall enough that you cannot remove the spark plug with a socket. I thought about attempting to loosen the spark plug from the top with vice grips but I was afraid I'd break it off as its just ceramic.

So I texted @SE-RMonkey - who is basically the king of creative ideas when it comes to mechanical problems. After some discussion, he came up with this: get strong crazy glue, apply it to the very end of the spark plug socket and put it down in the well and see if it can bond to and pull up the grommet.

The package on the glue says it bonds in 15-30 seconds, but I waited about 5 minutes, ha. I was pressing down with my extension.. and then yanked it upwards and out came the grommet!

Here's some pics:

Here's the grommet stuck over the plug:



Photo of the plug without the grommet, for comparison:



And thanks to @SE-RMonkey - here is the valve cover grommet, glued like cement to the bottom of the spark plug socket:



So if anyone else ever has this problem (I'd imagine I'm not the only one - a quick Google search found several forums with various makes and models who had this same problem) - now you know how to fix it.

Lol, good story... glad you got it sorted.

Correct.

Whew! Crisis averted haha! I wonder if vacuum would have worked also...tape a small diameter vacuum hose inside/around the normal size vac.hose and commence sucking! We use a setup similar to this at work because small items are often dropped into unobtainium areas and we can't use anything that would leave a chemical residue.

I would have been worried about getting the whole thing glued together.. lol... nicely done!

That crossed my mind too, but with a light coating just around the edges there was little risk of it grabbing hold of the porcelain. My first suggestion was to simply turn the car upside down, but.

Honestly it's amazing how these little valve cover grommets fit PERFECTLY over the spark plug wells. It's almost like it's by design.

I found a guy who had the same exact problem on the Bimmer forums:

https://www.bimmerforums.com/forum/showthread.php?1664455-Dropped-a-washer-into-a-sparkplug-hole

Luckily I must have waited just the right amount of time, lol. For anyone interested I used Gorilla super glue from Walmart, it's like $4 a bottle and holy heck is it strong.

I wonder if that glue could fix this forum?

I got one of those flexable gripper things where you press the button on the back and little "feet" come out the front kinda like the claw game, releasing the button pulls them back in. I forget what those are called. Those have helped me many times.