E3 Spark Plugs

[Mr Mower Man]

What's your opinion on E3 spark plugs? I see the occasional piece of equipment come into my shop with these plugs in them. I haven't researched them, but I find myself assuming it's just a fancy design gimmick to sell an expensive spark plug that's really no better than a standard style plug, and perhaps even inferior to a standard plug. Of course, I could be wrong.

But now that I think about it, none of my parts suppliers offer these, as far as I know. They offer every fuel treatment product under the sun, some of which are trash (in my humble opinion). So if they're going to offer gimmicky fuel stabilizers, why don't they offer the gimmicky spark plugs with the cool looking design?

I currently use a mixture of Champion and NGK (still slowly working away an overstock of Mega-Fire from Stens), and I really don't know of any reason to change. But then again, that's why I'm on this forum, to get new ideas.

So what do you think about the E3 plugs, and spark plug brands in general?

[bgsengine]

Only ever seen one of them and experience with just 1 is not enough to pass judgment on - You'd need to go through a hundred or so a year and keep track of how many "fresh failures" or "bad out of box" failures to get a decent handle on failure rates.. Which is exactly why we now use NGK almost exclusively with the single Champion RJ19LMC we stock for Briggs Emissions compliance engines.. over 30 years.. we have had "private label" plugs, we've used Autolite, Champion, Bosch, NGK, Mega-Fire, and Nippondenso (Now just "Denso" and out of all those brands, the absolute worst (1 of every 25 new plugs wouldn't fire new out of box) was Autolite , followed closely by that private label (which we later figured was made by Autolite) with 1 of every 30 (quit buying them after 300 plugs, with 15 of them were "D.O.A." ) , followed by Champion and Mega-Fire (Same thing really) with a maybe 1 in 100 failure rate and Nippondenso with maybe 1 out of 500 and amazingly enough, both Bosch and NGK are tops of the list , with only a couple or three per thousand plugs that we've ever had even marginally "bad" out of box and some of them were more likely handling issues (dropped, improper gap adjustment, etc) and since we have a better priced source for NGK, that's what we use any more.. about the only way to get any better pricing would be if we build our volume enough to buy factory direct from NGK. To date, we have had *ZERO* Spark plug related come-backs in the last 6 years of using nothin' but NGK (since the 2 or 3 bad plugs were found while they were being installed, or during shop service, they never made it out the door.)

Long Story Short: Very little experience with E3 and I don't believe in "Gimmicky" stuff as long as the quality is consistent - when it comes to small engines, a power improvement or fuel economy improvement in single digits is so infinitesimal no one but a test lab would even be able to detect the difference.. so what we look for is more what you might call "Consistent Quality Control" and it takes a lot of plugs tracked by one shop to come up with anything even resembling a good data sample..

[Craftsman GT]

My experience has been hit or miss. One engine may like it, one may not.

[JonCraig]

Like others, I have little experience with them--just one E3 plug in my garage. So obviously not a scientific study. But it's been in a single cylinder Briggs push mower for ~4 years and is still doing just fine. For what little this experience is worth...

[creia]

We use only NGK plugs in all of our builds. We used to use Champions, however, got a few that were duds. Since switching to NGK not one problem.
Michael

[grunt]

We use only NGK plugs in all of our builds. We used to use Champions, however, got a few that were duds. Since switching to NGK not one problem.
Michael

Welcome back creia. I don't post much but I do enjoy reading about your adventures with the vintage engine restores. Thank you.

[creia]

We use only NGK plugs in all of our builds. We used to use Champions, however, got a few that were duds. Since switching to NGK not one problem.
Michael

Welcome back creia. I don't post much but I do enjoy reading about your adventures with the vintage engine restores. Thank you.

Thanks for the welcome back grunt- it is appreciated! Yes, the engines that my son and I use for our builds and restorations are typically 40+ years old. Parts are almost always "NLA", or if they are available you have to search for months, pay a premium, or have them made $$$. There is so much collective knowledge and experience on this great forum, and members kind enough to share it, which has really helped educate us.
Michael