Hello all,
I finally removed all the glow plugs without breaking any. Read my last post.


I am in the middle of changing the glow plugs on my E300DT. Thanks to Lightman's thorough instructions, the intake manifold removal was not that bad. Here is my story so far:

Before embarking on this project I read all the forums and tried to educate myself as much as possible. So far I have tried the following based on the many posts I read.

1) I drove the car very very very hard on the highway, using B20 and a full large grey bottle of Power Kleen additive. Initially I would see a large trail of black smoke as I gunned the engine, but in a few days the car wasn't smoking (at least noticeably) anymore. I drove the car hard in order to try to clean any carbon buildup inside the cylinders, since the carbon is responsible for seizing the glow plugs in the head.

2) After I removed the intake manifold, I sprayed Power Blaster on the glow plugs for a couple days. I didn't even put a socket on the glow plugs.

The result so far is that GP #1, 2, and 4 came out very easily. I placed the 12 mm socket on #1 first and applied force to unscrew, it suddenly snapped free. I initially thought I broke it (because that is what I expected to happen), but then realized that it was easily coming out. The same pressure and the same fear struck me with #2. When I got to #3 I knew how much pressure was needed to free up the GP, but it would not budge.

I put #1 and #2 GP back, because I wanted to start the engine and warm it up. I read in other posts, that the GPs would come out easier if the cylinder head was warm.

After mildly warming up the engine. I removed GP #4 in the same way #1 and #2 came out. Applied pressure and suddendly it gave way.

Now to my problem(s).

GP# 5 and 6 slowly began to unscrew. I am going very slow with these two, since they are at least moving. I unscrewed them approximately one turn, then screwed them back in. I have done this a couple times now, but it is not getting any easier. I hope that unscrewing and screwing #5 and 6 will eventually succeed.

I have applied higher and higher pressure (compared to the other GPs) on glow plug #3, but it hasn't moved at all. I really don't want to break any of them.

I read that I might have some luck taking the injectors out and flooding the cylinder with biodiesel in order to loosen the carbon build up.

Does anyone have any advice or suggestions??

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1998 E300 Turbodiesel 184K