Heres the shocking story. Around 87, the army changed the spark plug wire systems on the 5/4 ton. There were shortcomings to the new system, and if the sparkplug wire wasn't snapped on to the spark plug ( I used to use a little allen key to sneak into there) then the spark would take a shortcut through the insulater. Most of the guys would then rip out all the wires and insulaters and do it again. I figured out that by isolating the bad cylinder(s), I could just change the bad insulators and make sure the wire was snapped on to the plug. This would save about 3 hours of labour.
I would loosen off all the nuts from the shielding to the sparkplug housing, and with the truck running, would have the operator (after all, it was his truck) pull out the wires one at a time while I felt the exhaust to see if the miss would change or not. The driver would ask "O-O-O-K-KAY-AY" to which I would reply "OK. When he found the bad one, I would say "Do that one again". They would say "O-O-O-K-KAY-AY" again, and I would say OK. Then they would say "Is that it?". No, I would tell them, we have to check all 8 in case theres another one.
I remember working on the welder's 5/4 for the same problem. I hated to do it to him, since he was a nice guy, but as he said, "It's my truck".
This is getting off topic from the original Iltis thread. If there were a thread about mechanics stories, I would tell you about Herby and the air cooled Jeep.
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