It has been about two years and the truck has been starting to run a little rougher than I would like to see. Keep in mind that I might have probably less than 20,000 miles on this cap and rotor but the time is what is important.
Took the cap and rotor off and I have to say that I can see how people have been stripping the cap screws when they were screwing them in.
The old kit I took off had this problem and it was because THE SCREWS WERE TOO NARROW IN THE KIT! I was comparing between two identical Niehoff kits in the local Canadian Tire here and one had bigger screws than the other kit. Make sure they are the bigger screws. The one kit had Torx screws which were one size larger and man did they ever screw in nice and secure with no stripping whatsoever.
Here is a pic of the bad screws and you can see how they weren't biting and were stripping the plastic.
These are too long and narrow. The good ones were shorter and fatter. The small screws in this pic are the old rotor screws, NOT the fatter cap screws. They were fine.
Here is a pic of one of the better electrodes in the cap.
You can see it is pretty corroded up and there is some carbon tracking and debris inside which will cause some arcing.
The rotor was in near perfect condition but I still swapped it out.
I REALLY hate replacing the cap and rotor on this engine, it is a NIGHTMARE back there. I screwed up one of my new wires too and the connection at the cap pulled out of the wire. I had to ghetto it back together and cram the connector back into the wire and insert it back onto the new cap.
If you are going to be doing this, leave the cap screws in label what goes where on the cap (and NO, they don't always match up with every cylinder, remember the 1 & 3 cylinder swap connection on the 1995+) and remove the wire connections remove the cap and rotor and reinstall the news ones. The reinstall takes 1/4 of the time as the removal of the old one.
Since doing this, I reset the computer and did a relearn and MAN, is the engine a LOT better. This is no BUTT-DYNO either. Much more pickup, smoothness and it idles much better when cold.
So if it has been over 2 years since you have done this, just do it!!!!
