Subaru Built a 300,000-Mile Engine. Then They Hid Four Spark Plugs Where No Socket Will Fit.

Everyone tells you the same two things about the Subaru boxer. That it is bulletproof, which is true. And that it is simple, which is a lie of omission. The boxer is simple. It is also flat, and they laid it down sideways in the bay with the cylinders pointing straight out at the frame rails, and then they hung the air box, the battery, the washer bottle and a heat shield over the top of it like they were daring you to find the plugs.

The plugs do not live up top, where a socket drops straight down. They live on the sides of the engine, out by the frame rail, behind the exhaust, in a slot about as wide as your three middle fingers. The front two you can win. The back two — cylinder four most of all — sit so close to the frame rail that the gap is shorter than the rubber boot on the coil. Owners on the forum talk about turning the coil a half turn just to wiggle it out. There is a thread, and I am not making this up, titled "Really?? Engine removal for spark plugs?" It runs nine pages.

Put the real number on the table. The plugs are about eight dollars apiece. The job is sold by the hour, and the boxer turns forty-five minutes of plug into two and three hours of access. Independent Subaru shops around here run a hundred and twenty, a hundred and forty an hour, and they are booked to the gills, because every Outback and Forester for two valleys comes to them. Quotes for four spark plugs land between six and nine hundred dollars depending on who picks up the phone. A fellow on the forum posted his invoice last winter: seven hundred and seventy-two dollars. For four plugs and an afternoon of a young tech fighting the same gap I was fighting.

So the belief sets in, the one you hear at every trailhead and every Subaru meet from here to the coast. You can do everything on a Subaru yourself except the plugs; for the plugs, you pay the man. I had half-swallowed it, sitting on an upturned bucket with raw knuckles and the battery out on the bench, doing the math on a car I had otherwise kept alive for the price of parts. My wife brought a coffee out to the garage and did not say a word. After thirty-eight years she knows the difference between a man who wants company and a man who wants a minute.

I met Marv on a Sunday at the Tumalo trailhead, where half the lot is Outbacks with bike racks and dog hair. He is seventy-two, thirty-four years a master tech at the Subaru store in Eugene before his knees retired him, and he was under his own lifted Outback in the gravel like it was up on a hoist. I told him about cylinder four, the rounded corner I had nearly made, the quote with the comma in it. He did not laugh and he did not suck his teeth. He reached into a canvas roll and came out with a flat steel bar, bright orange, a square drive at each end.

He had me press my thumb on the drive. Something gave, just slightly, inside the steel. A sealed roller chain, running the length of the bar. "The chain carries the turn around the offset," he said. "You come at the plug flat from the side, where the room is, and the pull lands dead square on the other end. It cannot fold, there is no hinge in it. It cannot walk, the drive never lifts. I built myself a rough one out of a bicycle chain and an old wrench back in the eighties, because cylinder four beat me too. This is the one somebody finally built right. Buy the real article and leave the copies be."

You will not find it at the parts counter, and you will not find it on a marketplace listing. BoltHero sells the offset extension wrench direct, from getbolthero.com, shipped to your door with a hundred-day money-back promise and a two-year warranty behind it. It costs a fraction of one shop's quote for the same four plugs — for the one tool that turns the job you dread into a quiet Saturday with the garage door up and the radio on.

Reach cylinder four → Get the BoltHero Wrench