hey it's about the mechanic again i'm here in the shop it's a monday and it's raining like hell so everything's soaking wet inside my shop everything's soaking wet outside the shop and so i have some free time to make videos for you guys hopefully it can help somebody i already made one video on cylinder misfires and i'm gonna make another one and the reason i'm gonna make another one is because so often that's the problem you've got a cylinder that's missing you got a dead spark plug or a dead coil okay or maybe a dead spark plug wire all right uh today specifically i got a 99 lexus that i'm working on it's a lexus rx 300 and what's going bad is the coils modern cars you know they have coils individual coils like this and they just sit in on top of the motor there's like one per cylinder if you've got six you might have six cylinders you got eight someone who might have eight of them and so basically these coils just sit on top of there they don't last forever just like nothing does and they go bad eventually and they'll cause a couple things to happen they'll cause your car to run like crap they'll uh it'll miss it'll shake the check engine light will come on for sure a lot of times a check engine light will blink at you and it freaks people out people call me all the time and say hey bo uh like the engine like the lights blinking at me you know it's not an emergency like the car is not gonna explode it doesn't mean that it's a time bomb but it just means that something's pretty big is going on you're getting this almost always it's a cylinder miss and you're running on five cylinders or seven cylinders or whatever it might be so i'll talk to you guys a little bit about that i'm gonna show you how to diagnose without even using a scanner if you've got a lexus because that's what i've got here i'll show you how to just kind of push the unplug a coil and move it to the other side and see if the problem jumps over to that side or not and i'm going to show you guys how to do that it's really simple i want to talk to you guys too just for a second about changing your spark plugs you know obviously you should always change your spark plugs you know at least every 30 000 miles every 45 000 miles i don't care if your car says that they can go 120. that's just kind of insane i don't i don't know what crazy person in a laboratory engineer mechanical engineer whoever thought that was a wicked idea we're just going to push the service limits to 120 grand dude i've done this for a long time and i do not think that's a very good way to go i mean it causes a lot of problems and i saw somebody that they commented on one of the one of the pages i think i'm like one of my nissan spark plug coil videos that i made and he said you know use anti-seize blah blah will keep that from happening and uh you know that's one of the reasons i haven't told you guys to use nec's any seas is kind of it's a great tool if you know how to use it but it can be really dangerous at the same time when you put anti-seize on a spark plug here's a spark plug okay anti-seize is used to keep the spark plug metal okay this is made out of metal it's to keep this metal and the aluminum block or the steel cylinder block that you're threading this thing into from basically welding themselves together and just becoming one unit okay theoretically the anti-seize will keep that from happening so you can take your spark plugs out at a later date and they just come out really easy that's the idea behind it okay but unfortunately what happens with anti-seize is anti-seize is really really bad for spark plugs the electrodes on the inside okay which is like this white piece it's the porcelain the electrode and the grounding strap which is this little piece that you always see sticking up but when you get in and he sees inside a spark plug it'll cause tons of issues with misfires it might come to life for a second and then die it'll make them die prematurely and i've actually seen more problems with anti-seize than without it okay now the good thing about nacs is that you can put anti-seize on the spark plug and you can leave it in there for maybe like seven years and hopefully you can just get the spark plug to come right out and it won't break off or do anything crazy when you try and unthread it but the reason that i don't want to tell you guys to really do that is because i don't think that you should change your spark plugs every 120 000 miles i think that leads to a lot of things like poor fuel economy a lack and performance okay and etc so and it's a super cheap thing to change you can change your spark plugs every 30 or 40 000 miles almost most people who are anywhere mechanically declined can change in themselves and if you change them every 30 or 45 thousand miles dude the average personally drives 10 or 15 000 miles a year so that's three years every three to five years you change your spark plugs and they cost 20 bucks that's such a minimal expense versus the you know the problems that people encounter so you know so i don't think you know all things said i don't think that you should push your spark plugs to 120 000 miles i don't think that's a great idea i mean i'm sure there's engineers out there will say they're totally okay for that just like oil is totally okay for six or ten thousand miles you know hell don't change your oil ever show me i mean i've seen lots of cars and uh you know you don't change your oil very often and they get sludge and carbon buildup i see that every day now if you don't they the engineers said they don't have to so whatever i just me personally i would change milo every four thousand miles three thousand miles just because it's cheap and it you know it's cheap insurance and didn't cost anything the spark plugs are the same kind of thing they don't cost anything costs 20 and you can do it yourself relatively easily so there again so then that's what i have to say about anti-seize if you're going to use it just be really careful be very very sparing with it and only get it on these thread parts okay don't just lather it on there okay it's one of those things where a little goes a long way so you just put a teeny bit on the threads and then thread it in and make sure you don't get any on the inside or else you're going to have a whole bunch of drivability issues and problems all right enough said about that enough preaching to the choir so here we go i know you guys are upset with me for having super shaky cameras too i've read a bunch of that stuff i'll try and be better or something more stable i don't know here's 99 lexus okay i think that i've already i've already taken the cover off but i'll show you how that crap goes back on let's turn the car on and see if we can get it to uh have a blinky check engine light there you go check engine light's definitely on it's not blinking right now but it will eventually if you try to drive this car around you can hear it it doesn't want to rev up right it's got 180 000 miles okay a lot of people have these man a lot of people's parents bought them and they kind of got it for gifts so if you're a young guy going to college you know you might have this for free and dude i went to college and i didn't have any money so i'm guessing that a lot of you guys don't have any money either so it's cool to be able to fix it yourself like 50 bucks and save the rest for drinking beer or something or whatever hanging out with hot chicks so here's your cover man if you you're in that boat you're a girl or a guy this is what your lexus would have looked like as soon as you pop the hood looks familiar right okay there's three allen key screws one two three i don't know why they need so many they just do okay it's toyota so there's three crappy little screws actually there's one right there from one ones that fell out i think it's a five millimeter allen key okay that's what it's called five millimeter allen key so take those three out then there's this lexus symbol you can just kind of turn it while pulling up on it and wiggling it around and it'll pop out like that okay so we take this and we put it over there awesome next thing you're going to mess with and i've already been in here to try and figure out what's going on is you got these bolts 10 millimeter right there's 10 millimeter bolts and all they do is just hold the spark coil pack down to the motor there's three one two three four five six there's three on the back side just like there's three here three here this is a v6 but it's going this way okay and for whatever reason lexus and toyota is kind of crazy they they're numbered kind of in a crazy way cylinder one is back here one two three four five and six so this is two four and six and one three and five are on the back and one three and five obviously suck ass to get to okay but it is doable it's totally doable and you don't have to take this stuff off it's not going to be fun it's going to suck but it's cheaper than paying somebody 600 bucks which is probably what they'll charge you maybe more okay mechanics will kind of rip you off that's unfortunately how they are this is not 1950 people will just take advantage of you so here we go all right this car is missing like hell i'm gonna turn it back on and we're gonna as you can see somebody's changed these two coils in the past so they're new but that doesn't mean they're good i've had tons of new stuff that was junk so we're going to turn it on i'm going to show you without a scanner how to figure out which one's going bad and which one's working okay and here's what we're going to do i'm going to turn it on and we're going to show you here we go don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out there's the dog she loves to hang out and intimidate okay cool right now i'm gonna unplug this one it's not gonna shock me it's not gonna do anything push down on this tab right here and pull at the same time oh did you see that listen it makes a definite change in the in the note of the engine hear it this cylinder is working for sure how about this next one nothing man so something's going on here obviously this cylinder something on this cylinder is not operating properly let's check this next one just for fun it's working see every time i plug it in it comes to life and you hear the engine run back up faster so now we think this one something's wrong here but we don't know for sure that it's the coil it could be the coil it could be the spark plug it could be the fuel injector it could be the wiring perhaps let's just take this one off and let's swap them so this crappy one now goes to here and this one goes to here so now this is going to tell us that the spark plug is bad or if it's the coil or the injector or something see that it comes right back alive okay so we know this one's good we know this one's good let's see nothing right no change in rpm no change in noise okay so we already know that that coil is bad okay let's come over here and turn the ferrari off we got the blinking check engine light now because it's running like absolute crap all righty let's yank this crappy one out and see see this is an original toyota denso coil this thing's got 180 000 miles on it and like i said they always go bad so it did all right well i just showed you guys how to figure out what's going on and it'll be the same way on the back cylinders right it'd be the exact same on the back cylinders it's just more of a to get to so i'm not going to show you guys because uh it's hard to hold the camera and do all that stuff at the same time but you would do it the exact same way you just unplug one at a time and see if you unplug it and it drops off or you hear an rpm change or it's like you know it was working you plug it back up and just smooths out a little bit well here's what i got you know i ordered these last week okay you can get a set a whole set of six of these this is the coil like i just showed you a whole set of six of them brand new off of ebay is about 90 bucks like 94 dollars i think it was free shipping so you can buy a whole set of six and i recommend you guys change all six at the same time okay just because you know you knock them all out it costs the same price you could buy one at a local retailer like the napa or the autozone advanced auto parts o'reilly's dakota auto parts whatever the hell you guys have you know any of those you could buy one for a hundred dollars or you can buy all six and wait three days and if you have the time i suggest you just order all six replace all of them for the price of one and uh you know while you're in there you might as well change the spark plugs too if you can and you got the time uh you know like you'll see it like a little bit not drastic improvement in gas mileage but you might get uh you know one mile per gallon or something like that if you've got really old spark plugs it'll help you for sure okay so that's you know that's basically what it is now i'm gonna go and i'm gonna i've already changed the spark plugs on this particular car not very long ago at all so i'm not gonna change the spark plugs i think they've only got four thousand miles or five thousand miles on that particular car that i've got here at the shop but i'm going to change all the coils just just to do it and uh you know and then i'm going to go on to whatever the next thing is that i got to do and i think specifically on this car stay tuned i'm going to make a video on struts how to do front struts and rear struts which is a fun video if you guys have ever done struts but anyway once again this is by the mechanic and uh happy hunting hey last little video i want to show you guys before i let you go here we are i'm changing this back coils just so you guys know i mean i thought about it for a minute i thought man you guys might not have even seen the bat coils before right there that is the back cylinder number one that we talked about and you can see you can just easily get to that one it's it's not super easy but it's not not definitely not that hard and right there is number what is it five that'd be number five and you can kinda maybe see it's kind of hard but right there's the bolt you can see the bolt head to cylinder three okay so you can shove your hand in there and you can get the coils out and the spark plugs it just sucks and i know you'll curse the whole time but like i said it's gonna save you you know it's gonna save you at least 500 and that's a lot of money 500 bucks is like almost a you know your house payment or your rent so anyway just proof and concept you guys can do it just do it and save money happy hunting later