Greetings folks... Had an interesting (frustrating!) anomoly with my 94 base today. Took it to the car was to clean her before meeting my fiancee's father for the first time (you know, that good first impression bit) and coming out of the car-wash, it started missing. Bad. I figured I had gotten the air filter wet, and kept driving. The missing continued. I figured that I had gotten some water on a connector, and drove home, about a mile drive. Of course, with one cylinder out of the picture, the drive took a while... Upon getting home, I went to pull the plugs to see which cylinder was missing. I found two LARGE problems I wanted to warn y'all about: 1) BORG-WARNER spark plug wires suck-diddly-uck. I replaced the stock units at 30k with these somewhat expensive Borg-Warner "coolwires", and the car now has a tad over 50k. Well, when I pulled two of the boots, they left little rings of rubber down around the ceramic on the plug. Result - I had to pick that ring out of there with a coat hanger before I could remove the plugs. Two things learned: our Probes run hot enough to toast wires quickly (be we all knew that), and that Borg-Warner wires, while a quality made, well designed product (all silicone!), don't stand up to Probe under-hood temps. Anyone have a suggestion for replacement, high-performance wires for the 2 liter? 2) BOSCH PLATINUM plugs also suck-diddly-uck. I found the cause of my missing - it wasn't water at all. (the water had nothing to do with it) Bosch platinum plugs have tips that are threaded - ie: the tip that the spark plug boot clip grabs threads off. Well, my number one cylinder plug had its vibrate off, which caused the missing and terrible performance. While I think Bosch Platinum plugs do last longer than stock, if I use them again I'll be using high-temperure Loc-tite to keep those little tips on. On all of the other plugs they were loose. I do know that the stock Motorcraft and the replacement Champions DO NOT have the little removable tip. Can someone pass this info along to the Maint list? I'm not on it anymore... Thanks and 73, Ben

Replacement wires? One word... "Magnecor". These things arent going to have you putting down 10 more hp to the wheels, but they are some pretty great wires. They are very well made, and if anything happens to them, like you accidently screw up and pull the boot and connector off one (My own car, it could only happen to me... :) ), they will replace it for you. I have magnecors on my own car, and my brother has one on his PSE, and both sets work great. On the plugs, I would recommend NGK V-Power's, or if they make them for the PSE 2.0l, AC Delco RapidFires. The NGK's and Magenecors seem to work good on the PSE, it idles nice and smooth and is running like new, and the Mag's and Rapidfire's on my car are great too. P.S. I dont think the boot problem is even possible with the PSE Magnecors. For some reason, every set of wires ever made for that 2.8l engine in my car has a boot design that IMO sucks. If you pull too hard, or just in the wrong place, that wire is toast. Dedric Ramsey dedric@...