How to Replace Spark Plugs 2009-18 RAM 1500

Hey friends. It's Len down at 1A Auto. Today we're going to be doing a very simple job. We're going to be doing spark plugs on 2016 Ram 1500 Hemi. It's going to be a simple job. The only problem is there's 16 of these bad boys, so it's going to take a while. You can do it. I'm going to be the guys who shows you how to do it. If you need these or any other parts, you can always come down to 1AAuto.com and check us out. Thanks.

All right friends, so we got her hooked up. We're up in here so we can see everything. What we're going to need to do, we're going to need to remove this air intake so we can take this off. We're going to take off a clamp down here. It's a small 8mm head. We'll take off a couple of clips. Hopefully this will come off the air filter box and we can get this right out of the way. Then we're going to go ahead and remove this so we can get to where the spark plugs and coils are.

First what I want to do is get any electrical connectors off so I make sure I don't get any tugs. I'm going to squeeze a little tab under here. I'll show you what it looks like in a second. Right there. All I did was grab that with my finger and squeeze it in. You can see how that works. That just plugs into the air flow sensor. Next, I'm going to come over here. I'm going to look at what we got. This looks like it should just hopefully come off. I'm just going to try to pry it free. I can use my small screwdriver, or if you have a small pry bar, whatever you've got. It seems like it's going to get ready to come free so we can come over here, see if we can remove these clips. Should be one more back here that I can't see, so bear with me. Got my last clip.

Let's see if I can get that. This is going to come out. There's little slide ins right here. I'm going to see if I can lift up and pull out a little bit. Let's see how this works. There we are. You can see these nubs slide into the slide ins right here. Now what we can do, is we can see if we can get this hose the rest of the way off. There we are.

Now we're going to go back over there for move that 8mm head. I'm using an 8mm with a swivel. You can use whatever you've got. It also works with a flathead. All we're going to do is loosen this clamp. We don't need to take it all the way out. We just need it loose enough to get the air filter housing off. Let's see if that's enough. There we are. Check the inside of the sensor. Make sure it looks like it's good right there. Take a peek in here. Make sure that's nice and clean. If it's not, we can clean it down with special cleaner.

Here, we have your butterfly of your intake system. We want to make sure that we cover that up. We don't want any debris or dirt or anything falling in there from what we're going to be doing. I'll just use a clean rag or a cleanish rag. It doesn't have any dirt or goo on it, so that's good. I'm just going to cover it. You don't want anything getting inside there.

Next what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this plastic. It should just pop straight up and then lift up and out. Let's see how this works. There we are. I'm going to pull it up and out, like I said. We'll put this out of the way. Very nice little emblem on there. Beautiful.

We've got the cover off. Now we're moving along. We can find the coils. One, two, three, four. There's going to be four more on the other side. What we're going to do is we're going to see what tools we need. We know that this red thing right here is a little lock. All I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my small screwdriver, try to lift it up, just like that. You don't need to flick it all the way off, it just needs to come up. I'm going to try to press in in the center right here. It's a little button just like before. I'm going to press in. You can use your thumb or your small screwdriver. Pull up on it. Take a peek inside. See if you see any funny rainbow colors. We don't want rainbow colors in there. All right. Once we get it off, we can look in here and make sure there's no rainbow colors in there.

Next ,we're going to use our 10mm. going to take off these two 10 mm bolts. Turning to the left, of course. Okay. I get one bolt though. Two bolts. Grab our coil. Just wiggle it around. Now we can take a peek, see if the connector looks like it's clean. It does. I see nice shiny metal. If you see rust or funny colors, you're going to want to take care of that. What do we see here? Oh boy, we've got a double. Nice. You know what that means? It's going to be two spark plugs. We get two spark plug boots right here. We're going to have to spark plugs. You can look inside there, see if you see any funny colors, or rust, or anything. It looks pretty good.

Next thing we got to do, I should say, we're going to go down inside here and we're going to see what our spark plugs look like. We can take a peek with our flashlight, make sure there's no dirt first. If you see any dirt, you can grab a little blow gun, spray it down in there, try to get out any dust. I'm probably going to do it anyway because it does look like there's a lot of dust and dirt around here. Basically, if anything got past these seals right here, it would work its way down into the cylinder area or where the spark plug is. Then we remove the spark plug, right? But all that dirt that's been sitting in there is going to go where? Down even further into where the piston is. Could cause a engine failure, engine issues, compression issues. We'll just grab our blow gun, blast a little air in there if you have access to it. If you don't, well I don't know what to tell you, but risky business.

I have my little air gun here. I'm just going to lightly blast a little bit around here. I'm going to be replacing this air filter. If I wasn't, I want to make sure that it's up and out of the way. We'll just do that. Basically when I'm blowing stuff around, we don't want dust and dirt getting up onto the top area of this air filter because what's supposed to happen is you're dirty air comes through here, through this, goes into this box. The dirty air then tries coming through this air filter as it's getting sucked through by the engine, through the tube we took off, so if we have dirt on the top side, well then the filter's not really doing anything to clean that air. We'll just get this right out of the way. You can take a peek at it while you got it out. If you end up needing one, of course I would replace it. Help the fuel economy. Back to what we were doing was going to blow this out. You can blow all around it if you want so that we know that all the loose debris is out of the way.

I'm going to be using a 5/8s spark plug socket. It's a spark plug socket. It's special because it has a little rubber inside and the little rubbers meant to go over this and hold it steady. If you use a regular 5/8s socket, your spark plug can wobble around in there and it might not be such a big deal if you break your old spark plug, but if you break your new spark plug, well, you're buying yourself another one so that's up to you. It's your prerogative. I would go with a spark plug socket 5/8s for this application. Also if you have an extension that doesn't have a wobble extension on it, I would try to find one. It's nice to have a little bit of angle when you're doing something like this. You can even get a spark plug socket that has this whole extension already just built right in, but I'm just going to go like this.

I'm going to start from the front, work my way back. Just try to stay in order. Get my ratchet on here hopefully. There we go. Turn it to the left. If you found that it was having trouble breaking free, you can go ahead and use a little bit of penetrant. I wouldn't use very much, but you could use a little bit if you have to. Sometimes they get a little bit of rust in there. See if I can get this out. I'll show you what it looks like. Come on. Thought I had it. Just like fishing, right? Come on. As you can tell, it's got a lot of threads. Hey.

We've got our new spark plug. We've got our old spark plug. We can compare them, make sure that they're both the same. You want to make sure that the length of the threaded area is the same on the new as it is on the old. If your one was like this, well, you've got the wrong spark plug. If your new one's like this, you've got the wrong spark plug and when your cylinder, your piston comes up, it could come up, hit this, smash this all in, it could cause damage to your piston. Could cause engine damage, essentially. You just want to make sure that they're the right size. Make sure that you got the same numbers. You go by the specifications for your engine. Let's just make sure LZF blah, blah, blah. Yep, checks out, right. It looks good. It looks good.

Before we install our spark plugs, now that we know that we have the right ones, we want to make sure that the gap on all of our new spark plugs is the same, specified to the manufacturer's specifications. If you find one that's bent in, maybe the box was dropped. It's possible, human error, things happen. So, we're just going to check all these spark plugs before we go ahead and install any of them.

All right, so here we go. We've got our 16 spark plugs because we have ourselves a hemispherical engine. We're going to check all the gap on these. It should be 0.043. We'll just take our gapper. We'll find the 0.043. We're just going to make sure that this kind of goes in like that. That's good. If any of these are crushed in or if you have to force this in, then you're just going to want to replace the spark plug. Just bring it back to wherever you got it, get a new one, because these type of spark plugs, you're not actually supposed to regap. If it's bent in, or bent out, or whatever it might be. Just get a new one. I'm just going to go down the line, check all 16 of these, and once we check them all we're going to move on to installing them.

I checked all the gap on all 16 spark plugs. Luckily for us, all of them are good. If they weren't, like I said, we would just go figure that out. I'm going to make sure that I start this in by hand. You don't want to get your ratchet all set up on here, and get it all ready to zap, in or use an air gun. You do not want to use an air gun to install spark plugs. People might use them for uninstalling. That's their preference. For me, I would use a ratchet for installation and removal. Like I said, I'm going to go by hand. By the way, the socket holds in the spark plug pretty well because of that rubber, so just to mention that. I'm going to go ahead and bring it in nice and slow. I don't want to just drop it in, because if it's not lined up with the whole perfectly, we could peen over that little end. If we peen that over, well, like I said, another spark plug. I'm just going to get this bottomed out and then I'm going to get the torque specification.

The spark plug, now that we got to in and bottomed out, we didn't try to torque it down at all. You'll notice that has a crush gasket on it or a crush washer, you can call it what you want. We want to make sure that we torque down these spark plugs to the specified amount, which is 13 foot pounds. I also like to note that you don't want to go above 15 foot pounds, so if you don't have a torque wrench, you don't need to go at of hardcore, Hercules. Just get it tightened down, bottom it out, and then give it a little extra tweak. For me, I'm going to go with a torque wrench because I spent a lot of money on it. I might as well use it. This is after I bottomed it out, so you can see that I still have to go quite a bit. Essentially, that was just me using my finger at the end there, so I wasn't really grabbing onto it. That's 13. Now, I'm going to do the rest of these spark plugs and then we'll move over to the other side.

Something that I like to mention with the coil is I like to try and clean off these boots as good as I can. I'll just wipe it down. You don't have to get too crazy. You could spend an hour if you want. For the sake of the video, I'm going to keep it as short as possible but still informative. I'm going to go with that looks good enough. But basically cleaned it off. Sometimes they'll be in worse condition, much dirtier. I'm going to take a little bit of dielectric grease or it's basically a silicone compound, but dielectric is important because you need it to conduct electricity. I'm just going to go right here, try to get a little bit inside that boot area where it slips over the spark plug and do the same for the other one. There's two here, so I might as well do them both at the same time, right.

Then I'm just going to go down along here. I'm going to try to get all the way around this on both of them, and this is just going to hopefully help keep out some of that moisture that's going to try to seep in. You know water, it's going to do what water wants to do, and I'm going to try to stop it. Because that's how I roll. Okay, so we've got this lubed, we've got this lubed where it goes over the spark plugs. I've got both my spark plugs in and torque to 13 foot pounds. I'm going to go ahead and install this back in. They line up pretty easily. If you forget which way the coil goes, you can just look at the way that the wire is. If you try putting it in like this, is the wire going to reach? Well, probably not. We'll just go the way that it does go. Put that in like that.

I have my two 10mm head bolts. I can start them both in. For these, I'm just going to put them in, get them so they're bottomed out, and then I'm going to snug them. Okay? I'm not going to tighten them down too much because this is just plastic. There's a little metal nutsert in there, but really once you tighten this down, it's going to spin into the plastic if you go too tight. We'll just get it bottomed out and then just give it a little snug, okay? If you happen to take all your coils out at the same time, you're just one of those people, you want to just take them all out, put them all aside, make sure you remember what order they are. It doesn't matter if you want to put a little marker, or chap stick, or lipstick, or whatever you got marking on there: one, two, three, four. That's not the number for the cylinder.

I'm not trying to say this is cylinder one, cylinder two, cylinder three. All I'm saying is mark them however you can so you can remember where they go and then set them aside where they're and safe. When you put them back in, put them back in the same exact order that you took them out. If one was here, or your square, or triangle, or whatever you decided to put your letter A, A goes where it was, right? B, C, and so on. Just put them back where you got from.

Anyway, moving along, continue with these bolts. I'm just going to get them all started, our bolts started in. Then like I said, I'm going to snug them up and then I'm just going to give them a little extra tweak after. Then I'm going to plug in this right here and make sure that I put the lock in and we'll go from there.

I got these bottomed out. I'm just going to go a little bit more. Like I said, not too much. I'm going to keep going just a little bit. Do the second one same exact way. Bottom it out. Give it a little bit more. Just so I'm sure in my head that these aren't going to be able to work their way back out. You don't need to use any thread locker or anything like that on these. They're not a super integral structural part of the vehicle. Just like I said, bottom it out, give it a little bit extra, not too much because this is just plastic. You don't want to break this, this is your valve cover. If you want instructions on how to replace that someday, just leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do.

We're going to take our connector. We're going to line it up. Listen for that wonderful click. Lock it in. Give it a little shake. It wiggle a little bit, that's okay, but it's not lifting up. That's all done. We did these two spark plugs this one coil, we can move along.

Okay, so we're on the other side. Generally speaking, we'll start it this way and go to go down the line. Like I said, marketing your coils if you're going to take them all out at one time. I'm just going to skip ahead. I'm going to do the third one, which is right underneath the brake booster, because these are all pretty simple to get to. I'll just show you how to do the hardest one. It's going to be basically the same as the other side. We're going to remove this lock, pull it up. Pops right up. Anyway, just like always on all the rest of them, we're going to look inside, look for funny colors. It looks good to me. We're going to remove our 10mm head bolts right here. Should be pretty simple.

We also need to keep in mind that as we loosen this, the head of the bolt's going to keep coming up. It's going to drive our ratchet up into the booster. If you get it all the way up there, you might not be able to get it out, so once you get it broken free, just go ahead and try to do by your hand. It might be easier. There we go. I'm going to do the top one.

We got the coil coming up. Oh, no. Well, let's just go like this. The rubber boots are flexible. They're rubber. They can go like that and like that. Take a look at it. Make sure they're not cracked. They look pretty good. We can go ahead and blast a little bit of air in here like we did before. Once we get the air in there, we'll go ahead in with our 5/8s spark plug socket and we'll get those out. I got my air.

Okay. Find my socket, right here. Spark plug socket, like I said. See if I can get this to work its way down in there. Okay. There's one. I'm going to grab my hand ratchet, put it in reverse so it'll be turning the spark plug left, counter clockwise. This is the same as removing the other spark plugs, an exception of just being careful, not to come too high up because of the brake booster, like I mentioned. I don't have a very large extension on here at all, so it should give us plenty of room to come up as far as we need to. Once it's good and loose, if you wanted to, you can go ahead and take the ratchet off of there. Get it all of the way out. Let's see. Okay.

Take a look at it. It looks pretty good. If you see a whole bunch of white deposits or anything all over there, it could be because of cheap gas. Maybe you go to a cheaper gas station, not top tier, and that's fine. You can go wherever you want, but if you do see it, that's just what it is. It's just deposits. No big deal.

Go ahead and put it on our new one. Let me see if I can put it in without dropping it. I want to go in nice and easy, just in case that spark plug doesn't go directly into the hole. You don't want to bend down that electrode, like I said. I'm just going to get it in by hand and here. It might be a little bit harder to get the torque wrench in, but I'm going to see if I can do it. Once again, it's 13 foot pounds.

We've got our torque wrench, 13 foot pounds. Like I said, we only want to go 13. You don't want to go above 15. You can cause engine damage. There isn't very much swing, so you're just going to have to do the best you can. If you can't get your torque wrench in here, well, just do the best you can. Get that off of there. We're going to go ahead and do the same to the other spark plug there.

I've got this second one nice and loosened up. It should be about ready to come out. We're going to have this brake booster in the way, so all we're going to do, I'm going to to try to grab my extension off of the socket, and I'm going to pull that up, and there we go. If I left the extension on, I would be coming up, and the noise you kept hearing was me hitting the extension up against the brake booster ... So I just tried to get it up high enough that I could grab onto this socket, I removed my extension, and that gave me enough room to just come up with this.

We'll do a quick inspection. It looks okay. Set it aside. Grab our new spark plug. You always want to make sure they're not cracked in any way. Now, this is going to be a little bit harder to get in there without dropping it in, right? Because we're going to have to hold. Once we get it in the hole a little bit, we're going to have to continue holding it. Try to push our extension in without dropping it and slamming this into the engine head. I'm going to see if I can do it. It's going to be ... There we go. Okay. Nice. Okay, get that in. I'm going to just snug it up to the 13. there we are. Okay. Now we can go ahead and get that coil back on there.

Get our dielectric grease right here. Put it inside the tube where the spark plugs going to go. This is going to help make it pull off nice and easy the next time you go to do your spark plugs a hundred thousand miles from now. Just put it around here to help keep the moisture out. Let's get this puppy mounted in.

I'm going to bend these a little bit. Start them into the hole. Move my arm out of the way. Let's see if I can push them down. Okay. Get the bolts lined up with the holes, we'll just get these going in by hand, making sure that our wiring harness is out of the way. We don't want to get pinched by anything. Try to get these in as far as you can with your fingers. You might've gotten a little bit of dielectric grease on your hands or your glove, it might make it fun for you. And it does. Now I'm going to use my ratchet. I'm going to put in the on position so I'm turning to the right. It's bottomed out. Just give it a little bit and do the same to this one. Okay. Bottomed out. Give it a little bit. There's that.

We've got our electrical connector, we know the lock's on this side, lock's over here. There's that click. Push in the red lock. Give a little wiggle. It doesn't slide off. That one's good to go. Now we're going to do the same for the rest of these.

Now, it's trying to put back in our air filter. It's up to you if you want to put it in a dirty one or not. If you don't, grab a new one. Make sure your air filter box is cleaned out. Get out as much dirt and debris as you can. Slide that puppy in. It should fit in nice and firm. If it looks like there's a gap anywhere, you want to make sure that you double check to make sure it sizes it up with your original air filter. I already did that. I could have probably done it on camera for you, but I'm sure you could figure it out.

We've got our air filter in. We're going to look at this cover. We've got two little prongs, one, two, and two rubbers back there, one, two. We want these to slide into there and then slide down. We've got two rubbers here, one there, one there, and we have a plastic piece here, a metal piece there. Basically those are going to press into here, these are going to press into there. To show you, sorry, there's also these little arrows, they kind of just let you know where the prongs are going to be, so when you're looking at the holes, you can have a fairly good idea of where things are. Let's see. That feels pretty good. We'll put this up in there. Give it a little wiggle. It feels good. Okay.

We've got our rag on here still. That's going to go to the air filter housing. Now, we'll go ahead and remove our rag. We'll take a peek inside, make sure there's no dust, dirt, debris, nuts, bolts, anything that might have possibly fallen in there for some reason. I've got my housing, we've got these slotted areas, and we have the pronged areas on the other end. Basically what I'm going to do is I'm just going to get this started on here a little bit. I'm not going to tighten this clamp yet because I want to be able to wiggle everything around. I'm going to come around the other side. I'm going to try to get these prongs into the slots, just like that. Okay. I'm going to push down. Using my force, I'm going to try to lift and push on these clips. These ones come around the backside here might be harder because it's quite the angle to try to get your arms at. Grab this one real quick.

Now I'm going to switch angles so I can move my arms. I'm just going to lift up on it a little bit. It clips right in. I'm going to grab this hose and some over here anyway. Slide that right in. It feels good. We didn't loosen this clamp. If it was loose, you'd want to make sure you tighten that up. Maybe I'll give it a little bit of a snug, actually. It looks like it could go for some. I did not loosen that, but I will tighten it. Oh yeah. You're not going to get any air blown by there. Any air that comes through has to come through this air filter first.

I'm going to come down here. I'm going to make sure that this inlet is completely down onto the intake side. I'm going to use my 8mm. It also has a slot for a flat head screwdriver if you want. I'm going to go ahead and tighten this down to the right. Get my hand under here. Okay. There we go. That feels nice and snug.

We have our sensor wire. We've got the clip. That's just going to go right in here. You hear the audible click, give it a little wiggle. Give everything a little wiggle. All right everybody, looks like we completed spark plug job. Awesome.

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