Wow! All this shake up over spark plugs! The marketing guys must be having a field day with y'all! Well first aways I did a little gap checkin last nite at work, and pretty much observed that all the plugs are about pre-gapped at .040 (except the one I dropped)! Also it appears that Mother Mopar did not jump on the platinum bandwagon and issue Platinum plugs as Original equipment on Magnum V-8s. As all you hip guys know, platinum is a harder than steel metal that can take some more abuse from higher voltage electrical systems. The plugs may last longer but whats the reason if your wires and cap/rotor are shot?
I have had some real good results with champion truck plugs in my mud boggin ram charger, but I also upgraded my entire ignition system as well.
Now heres the Quandry. Autolite markets thier platinum plug AP5224 at $1.99 while Champion gets $2.49 for thier truck plug #4071. The champ plugs have a look and feel of an aviation sparkplug,with all that gold lettering, and black insulator and probably cost more due to the MASSIVE chunk of copper inside them.
I'd guess tho, based on what Mother Mopar uses,Regular ol'99 cent plugs would work! Uuuf da!
Speaking of Autolite the brand, and its affiliation with Ford, motorcraft is now the official Ford OEM replacement. Autolite, in its many guises, was at one time owned pretty much by Bendix corporation, and or thier holding companies.
I can't speak for others, but I've been running Autolite plugs in Mopars since 1977, and they always did thier assigned task. I wish enthusiasts would be as concerned about the quality of thier caps, rotors, wires, etc.
Now lets talk exhaust..since the mode of translation is electricity...lets pull out my Electricity for Idiots book (a much lower grade than Dummies)so I can relate.
Ok, Lets say your exhaust system is a simplewire circuit. Every time a cylinder exhausts it generates voltage and amperage. The voltage is the carrier right? Now the cool thing is that each time a volt is created, it does something non electrical---it helps pull the same voltage out of the next exhausting cylinder! Thats called scavenging. The problem is that all these volts(on a ram)get caught up in a GIANT resistor at the end of the Y pipe wire called a catalytic converter. Just like an electrical system, this creates heat, back pressure etc. Since we cant modify any of these components easily, lets see if we can assist things after that.
Remember the term scavenging I used? Lets see if we can on that a little. Since we can't break up the head pipes, lets do a pressure drop after that giant resistor. thats pretty non electrical, but itslike putting a bigger wire after the small wire. The pressure drop in the air when the exhaust pulse hits the larger pipe actually helps pull out the next exhaust pulse. Back in the 60s and 70s this was called "extraction" by the Volkswagen guys.
This means simply, by increasing the pipe size after the converter, we can improve our flow thru the exhuast.
Now heres the marketing trap. Dual systems that use very small pipes and mufflers areMORE restrictive than the stck system. Think BIG when choosing an after cat system.
Thats all for now, folks!
Dd