It’s amazing how quickly a plan can go a little bit south. Maybe not “my life is completely ruined” south, but certainly southward enough to bring out the compound curse words. I mean, replacing ignition coil packs should be easy. A few bolts, a few connectors, and open sesame, yeah? Well, not always. I recently found myself in a bit of a pickle, and the thing that saved the day was a common household item not normally found anywhere near a garage. Oh yes, it’s coat hanger time.
The other week, I noticed my BMW 335i’s idle wasn’t as steady as it should be. Could it be an air leak? Obscenely expensive fuel injector failure? A physical timing issue? Not exactly. A little bit of datalogging revealed general ignition unhappiness, and given that the spark plugs were replaced less than 25,000 miles ago, my bet was on weak coil packs. Hey, it’s a turbocharged car with more than 146,000 miles on the clock. It’s probably time, right? Since Eldor coils were out of stock locally, I ordered a set of OEM Bosch units and got cracking pretty much as soon as they arrived.
You do have to pull the cowl plastics to access the rear coil packs on a six-cylinder E90 3 Series, but it’s not that bad. A couple of clips, a couple of rubber tabs, six eight-millimeter bolts for the cabin air filter housing, two more for the cowl tray, a couple of Allen bolts for the engine cover, and presto. Indeed, all was going well until cylinder three. Out of general caution, I wiggled the coil pack back and forth, then felt a slight but unusual jolt. Upon removing it from its home, I was treated to this lovely sight. Doesn’t this coil pack look a bit short?
Indeed, the rubber boot that goes around the spark plug and keeps it insulated decided it didn’t want to stay attached to the coil pack itself. It was still down in the bowels of the spark plug well, and that presented a problem. With the boot remnant down there, I couldn’t install a new one. Cue the faffing about. Trying to stick a flathead screwdriver down there to free the boot didn’t quite work, neither did making a few strategic incisions nor gently threading a screw into the rubber boot and attempting to pull the whole thing out. The situation didn’t seem to be going well, until I remembered that I had a coat hanger.
The humble wire coat hanger is legendary for its contributions to bodgery. It can function as an exhaust hanger, Band-Aid together a wiper mechanism, even replace certain springs and cables in a fix that might essentially last the life of a vehicle, assuming the vehicle sucks enough. However, my 335i doesn’t suck, and I’m not thinking that out of arrogance. Any running, driving car with a heater, functional air conditioning, no undue play in the suspension, and no error lights on the dashboard is a good car, and good cars deserve better than bodges. I didn’t reach for a coat hanger as an emergency fix, I reached for one as an emergency tool.
Unsurprisingly, the spark plug wells on an N54 engine are deep. Deeper than the reach of any of my pliers. Deeper than the reach of my picks. What I needed was a really long 90-degree pick, and when you think about it, reasonably stiff wire should make for a pretty decent pick. Not ideal, obviously, but hopefully sufficient for what I needed to do. Plus, it was properly late. All the auto parts stores, hardware stores, and even the liquor stores were closed (this explains why most of the photos here were taken in the daytime post-incident). Time for a Hail Mary.
The plan was simple: Take a section of coat hanger wire, remove the plastic coating from one end to make it thinner, grab a set of locking pliers, and bend just the tip to a 90-degree-ish angle. Then, take the piece of wire, jam it in between the side of the boot and the head until it bottoms out, crank it like Soulja Boy to break the boot free, and pull. It took a few attempts, but by the light of my phone flashlight, I managed to successfully extract the broken boot without breaking something else.
The rest of the procedure was remarkably unremarkable. Old parts out, new parts in, then for the moment of truth. Before putting everything back together, I pressed the start button and the engine whirred into life. Less than half a minute later, after the initial cold start enrichment had run its course, I got my answer: a rock-steady idle. Turns out, new coil packs also fixed a bit of hesitation I was feeling, but I couldn’t have done it without a coat hanger.
Is there a dedicated specialty tool out there designed for this situation? Sure, but a coat hanger did the trick for a price far lower than even a set of 11-inch needle-nose pliers. I’ve seen ten-packs go on sale for less than three dollars. That’s under 30 cents per improvised tool. Work on any car, and it’s probably going to test you. Eventually, you’ll need to be resourceful, and sometimes that means bending a coat hanger to your will.
Top graphic image: Thomas Hundal
>Hey, it’s a turbocharged car with more than 146,000 miles on the clock
Hmm, I’ve been noticing my idle hunting a bit too. I’ve changed the plugs a couple times but never the coil packs, it’s probably past time.
Coat hangers are just the right combination of stiff and bendable to be useful in many ways.
hanger also works magic when you want to feed the wire through the firewall grommets
While attending an SCCA Trans Am race back in the late 70s as a working photographer I managed to lock my 78 Ford Fiesta leaving the keys in the floor console. After a burst of cursing through my entire swear words vocabulary I spotted a path to redemption – I’d left the sunroof partially open in the vent position! It only took about five minutes to find a motorhome owner to borrow a coat hanger from. The hanger had to be completely unwound to be long enough to reach through the roof to the floor where the keys were, but I succeeded surprisingly quickly. I got the last “press ride” of the day with David Hobbs in BMW’s 320i race car that year. I’ll never forget that day, though he coat hanger tale is subordinate to the Hobbs ride!
I once welded a flat file to a sawzall blade to make a power file. Surprisingly, it worked remarkably well.
I always keep a coat hanger in my trunk!
I didn’t have to use it when my exhaust fell off, though, because I happened to be heading home for Christmas with my full toolbox in tow, including a spool of aviation-style lock wire!
The coat hanger IS a specialized tool. You just used it for something else. Well done!
I’ve used coat hangers as welding wire with a gas torch to fix motor mounts, exhaust systems, spring perches, as well as many of these other fine bodge fixes. I keep a small collection of them in my ‘other’ parts cache. I’ll have to replenish the supply before they become extinct.
I have done the same but to make a 1/8″ (I think?) nut driver from an Allen grub screw and a Craftsman flat screwdriver. I was the FNG in an industrial maintenance shop surrounded by old guys telling me it wouldn’t work. The gas torch softened the steel of the driver shank enough to allow a hole to be drilled down the middle. It was perfect for the job. A coat hanger supplied the filler metal.
I keep a wire coat hanger in the (enclosed) bed of my pickup truck.
Back in the day, this was how to keep the exhaust from dragging after the inevitable exhaust mount failure or when the exhaust rotted away that it broke apart just before the mounting strap.
Ahhh… Good times. 🙂
Ha many moons ago I fixed a dragging muffler on a friend’s Chrysler k-car wagon using a wire hanger as an improvised muffler hanger. It wasn’t pretty, though it was our of sight and did the job admirably