Another small block turbo early valiant

I can almost guarantee that didn’t happen because of the heat range of your plugs. Sure a colder plug provides a “little” bit of a margin of safety with regards to detonation but if you destroyed a piston and popped a head gasket, the tune was too aggressive or you didn’t have enough ring gap, or enough octane, or all of the above. At that point a colder plug is not likely to save the engine.


Well, I found the NGK GR5s to be the root cause of it.......

I swapped the entire turbo setup onto a 318 and installed NGK 5671-9 plugs gapped at .028" in it and had no further issues, even up as high as 14psi on pump gas.