Nanobeavers? Or something else eating these plugs.

OK, refresher from the car thread:

2013 Rio5 1.6 Hyundai GDI engine. engine has 92k miles. Those plugs I put in 3000 miles ago. I *believe* I may have seafoamed the car AFTER I swapped plugs. These were OE boxed OE part numbered replacement plugs from Amazon. These do NOT have the iridium tips like the original and the replacements I put in this morning. 

Coming home from GL sunday 40 miles out the car started missing hard, flashing CEL and P0302. Anything over 1/4 throttle with load caused the dead miss.Pulled the plugs yesterday morning to find this. Got replacement NGK Iridium plugs from the local parts house and installed this morning. Made it 1/4 mile and hte CEL was flashing again. P0302. quickly swapped coils from 1 and 2, reset codes. 1/4 mile later flashing cel. P0301. Great. It's a coil, its easy enough to grab one. drove it gingerly into work, rechecked and now we have 2, P0302 and P0301. 2 came back. The miss following the coil with new plugs tells me its a coil issue there. No problem. But whats up with 2? And why do these plugs look like this in 3k miles? Until Sunday at 10:45pm there has not been any codes or issues to date. 

Thoughts?

this is what the originally looked like

Heat build up from parts connectivity? I've seen two manufacturers parts not jive well together. Is everything oem except the plugs?

Detonation? High resistance? 

Seems like some kind of heat build up. 

In reply to Tom1200 :

I agree. Definitely heat with the ceramic cracking like that. 

There is an intake on it so I could hear the engine. Everything else stock

In reply to bobzilla :

You wrote, "coming home from GL (GridLife)...just 3,000 miles since..." 

Did you run the Rio on track for GridLife?   How many track days/sessions have these plugs been subject to?  

bobzilla said:

this is what the originally looked like

I'm confused by your statement that they weren't iridium.  If the picture I quoted above is what they originally looked like they're precious metal of some sort and geometry of the damaged plugs look like a precious metal plug.  All fine wire plugs made to OEM specs have precious metal tips.  They just won't last without them.  The choice of precious metal is largely market driven.  Iridium, Platinum, Yttrium and all the other iums in the same general area of the periodic table of the elements all perform the same and the wear is similar. 

The damage to the insulator is textbook detonation.  The large gaps are what happens when the precious metal tip comes off.  That can also happen under detonation.

A few thoughts on what's happening now and how you got here.

• Running plugs with those huge gaps could easily kill coils and bad coils at your mileage isn't really a surprise either
• Detonation could cause piston damage.  It'll collapse the ring lands and/or burn the edge of the piston so your #2 issue could be compression related
• Detonation can turn into preignition which will burn a hole in the center of the piston so again the #2 issue could be compression related
• Detonation can burn valves and that too will cause a misfire
• You mentioned that you think you Seafoamed the engine.  Did you do that as routine maintenance or were you trying to fix a specific problem?
• What I think, and hope happened is that the plugs were counterfeit and the tips weren't actually precious metal.  That would account for the preignition and aggressive wear.  If that's the case then new plugs and coils will fix the electrical side and if you're lucky there's no mechanical damage.
• If the plugs are symptom and not a cause then you really need to find out what's causing the preignition.

In reply to APEowner :

I seafoam all our gdi engines every 30k ish for preventative maintenance. The new plugs I installed this morning were ngk silk6 something something 10e. The plugs I pulled out that I installed were slk6 blah blah blah. The missing I indicates they were not iridium. Tipped. 

*EDIT: SILZKR6B10E are the plugs I just put in it. SLZKR6B10E are what came out.

bobzilla said:

These were OE boxed OE part numbered replacement plugs from Amazon.

There is someone on the golfmkv forum had a problem with a set of NGK plugs from Amazon. He thinks that they are not real NGK plugs. He linked to a Youtube video about this problem too.

Maybe buy a set from a more reputable source and see if that cures the problem. You also might want to drop down a heat range if you're going to track the car. I wound up doing that on my GTI.

https://www.golfmkv.com/forums/index.php?threads/my-second-build-on-my-08-gti.194553/post-7602195

I missed the APEowner called out the counterfeit plugs in his post.

Already replaced with new NGK's from Oreilly. I got one coil on order that'l be here today. I'll replace that and then borrow a borescope to look at two.

From education that stopped over 7 years ago and off the shoulder:

The reason we use precious metals, platinum and iridium specifically, is their extreme resistance to degradation while being used as a firing and ground contact on extremely high energy ignition systems, coupled with their superior thermal characteristics it generally gives far more than the conventional 12-15k mile range expected on standard copper core plugs. 

The key to most new style coils is the way they generate and recapture spent energy. Most are technically wasted spark designs that fire a positive charge from one coil as another coilbopens up for negative charge and the spark jumps that plug negative to positive eventually all coils have fired positively and negatively throughout a few rotational series.

Personally I think there is something hokey about your specific plug. It was either mislabeled and was a much hotter plug, is a very poorly constructed copy or you are running hellishly lean. Personally I would look into the last guess first now that other plugs are installed.

Nobody supports the nanobeaver hypothesis? 

Already replaced with new NGK's from Oreilly. I got one coil on order that'l be here today. I'll replace that and then borrow a borescope to look at two.

I advise, "don't forget the anti seize" because you will likely be pulling these plugs often to check, like before and after future track days. 

The hypothesis of counterfeit is building traction! 

I recommend trying for an Amazon refund. 

In reply to John Welsh :

They were $29 for the set. I put thesame ones from the same vendor in the wifes car. I think I'll check that one tonight as well.

EDIT: I've actually bought multiple sets from the same vendor. I guess it's possible their supplier gave them some crap. we replaced the wife's '14 Koup, the Tiburon and her 12 Rio5 SX which was why I was fine ordering the same again.

mazdeuce - Seth said:

Nobody supports the nanobeaver hypothesis? 

I do like it, even if it's just for the face the service writer would make if you explained the hypothesis to them.

bobzilla said:

In reply to APEowner :

...The missing I indicates they were not iridium. Tipped. 

*EDIT: SILZKR6B10E are the plugs I just put in it. SLZKR6B10E are what came out.

The NGK numbering system isn't that simple anymore.  The I in the string before the R does indicate iridium but they also use letters after the heat range designator (6 in this case) to define the electrode and a bunch of other features.  They also publish 3 different numbering systems and have numbers that can't be decoded with the charts.  Some of those numbers can't be decoded from the charts because they don't exist and others are because the chart decodes to  something useful like "special design."

NGK calls out the following for your car

SILZKR6B10E - This is the OEM part

LKR6BHX-E -  This is a Ruthenium electrode

LKR6AIX - This is from their Iridium IV series of plugs

LKR6AGP-E - This is one of their G Power plugs which has a Platinum electrode

The definitive source for all things NKG is ngksparkplugs.com/en/part-finder

More directly related to the issue your having.  SLZKR6B10E does not seem to be a valid NGK part number which would further support the counterfeit plug theory.

And Ali-Express happens to list a SLZKR6B10E.

Detonation is not your friend.

Me thinks someone was hammering the dog doo out of it!  ( X 10)

Ok. Changed the coil in the parking lot at work. Cleared the codes. P0302 from Sunday is still logged. Won't clear it. 
 

drove home, doing all the things that made it unhappy before. Low revs, high load abs matting the gas. Mat the throttle through 3 gears. Steady state driving in 6th and roll on the throttle. All normal. No new cel. No new codes. Just the old one. 
 

is there some odd thing where it holds codes that were severe in nature longer? 
 

scoped 2 and 3 (3 had large pieces of porcelain missing) and both looked good. Cant get enough deflection to look at the cylinder walls but the pistons have what look like normal amounts of carbon on them. They were a little cleaner than the wife's auto, but she has about 6k more miles on since we seafoamed it. 

What type of code clearing device are you using?

mazdeuce - Seth said:

Nobody supports the nanobeaver hypothesis? 

I ONLY came here for the nanobeavers. 
 

Leaving sadz 

QuasiMofo (John Brown) said:

What type of code clearing device are you using?

It's an older obd2 scanner I've had for years. Limited functions but does have sone decent live stream data but doesn't record. 

So I have had a few different OBD2 scanners and have found not all of them clear the codes all of the time. For giggles do you have anyone nearby, including Dangerzone, that can give clearing the code a try? 

Besides the P0302 code it seems to be acting correctly?