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Hi Inroads, Your thought pattern is totally valid. Here's how I see it. The fuel/air charge hits the combustion chamber and explodes, creating heat. The explosion heat is based mainly on the F/A mix as well as the compression ratio. Those two factors don't change much. As long as you get a good explosion the plug will look good. As for all that heat...you want enough to stay around to keep everything working at 100% but not so much as to cause problems. That has always been the problem with internal combustion engines. The Wright brothers could only run their engine for a few minutes because of their cooling problems (but I digress). Our engines appear to get up to something less than 180F when measured by my crude experiment. In fact, the cylinder and head were in the 135-145F range after a romp down the Interstate for about 20 minutes (followed by less than a mile to my driveway). This tells me that the internal engine temps are no where near the 190F I'd like to see in order to burn off junk in the crankcase. I could be wrong and this would not be a first time. Still, this is the first engine that I have owned where the oil samples came back with more than 0.5% fuel in the oil. On the Zong the last reading was 3%. I am awaiting the results from my last sample.
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