Help! Coachmen.

jncrowe12 · February 11, 2016

Spark plug blew out of head 20 miles from home while we were just leaving for a race weekend in New Hampshire. Had to have motorhome towed and waited three days for the repair. Missed the race weekend. Was told that this is a common occurrence for the Ford V10 Aluminum block. I have Ford Coachmen (almost travel trailer) V10 2002y, 181k miles, but have never heard even a bod word about coachmen ford. (if exclude many ford haters).

Kirk W · February 11, 2016

Welcome to the Escapee forums! Sorry that it was a problem that brought you here, but we will do what we can to assist you.

We owned the 275 hp version of the Triton V-10 and had great service from it and the same has been true of many other Ford chassis owners, but the change when the V-10 first increased to 310 hp was partly an increase in compression and there have been some problems with them blowing out spark plugs. It usually happens after a plug change when the installer fails to properly torque the plugs to Ford specs but there have been other cases reported. The torque on that version of Triton's spark plugs is critical as the head does not have as many threads for the plugs as they should have provided in the aluminum head. You can see some pictures and information about the problem on this link from blownoutsparkblug. The problem was solved by Ford in later production of the 310 engine and seems to have gone away with the newest, 362 hp version that came out in 2005.

Sniper · February 11, 2016

You may want to consider carrying one or two of these along with you: http://shop.advanceautoparts.com/p/dorman-help-cylinder-head-repair-kit-42025/22146562-P?searchTerm=ford+spark+plug+repair I'm not sure I would trust it as a permanent repair (I do have a friend that put one of these in over 50,000 miles ago, and it's still going strong), but it may well let you continue on your trip until you can get it in to the shop.

AFchap · February 12, 2016

It was a common problem also on the Triton V8 engines in the late '90s. I had one blow out of a 1997 4.6L v8 under normal acceleration while driving to work one morning. I drove it about 10 miles further to the dealer. As Kirk said, my failure was indeed shortly after a dealer service session.