Are iridium spark plugs worth the extra?

[Lanceautoman]

I have a 2011 CB600FB Hornet 600. Plugs are due a change. Are iridium ones worth the extra money?

Cheers

[Bender]

Standard plugs are fine, iridium are great if your wringing the neck out of high performance

[Gerontious]

My bike has iridium plugs as standard and this has nothing to do with the bike being high performance. By modern standards it isn't.

It's all about longevity. Iridium is not eroded by the spark anything like as quickly as standard spark plugs. Mine get changed at the 24,000 mile service. And I have seen numerous reports of it not being done until the 32,000 without issues.

They were chosen by Honda for that reason. And no other.

It's only worthwhile going for iridium if changing the plugs is a pain in the neck.. A relatively big job you would rather not do at the intervals your bikes manufacturer recommends. You can take that interval and basically double it. Though you need a clean burning engine to take full advantage of this.

Other. Slightly less important factor is iridium don't need to be gapped. It's a tricky thing to attempt and likely to not end well.

Edited January 12, 2020 by Gerontious

[Bender]

Standard as in what was speced for the bike, if they came with iridium then you obviously wouldn't go backwards.

[Gerontious]

Standard as in what was speced for the bike, if they came with iridium then you obviously wouldn't go backwards.

 

I'm not suggesting that.

[Mississippi Bullfrog]

I did not notice any discernable difference in performance compared to the standard plugs in good condition. But they have a marginal gain in that they hold their performance longer. The downside of that is that I dislike not removing plugs regularly so that kind of negates any real benefit for the extra cost.

I tried them. Went back to normal plugs as I found nothing to warrant the cost.

[MikeHorton]

I have a 2011 CB600FB Hornet 600. Plugs are due a change. Are iridium ones worth the extra money?

Cheers

 

I'm not sure what plugs are in my new bike, I did swap the standard one in my royal Enfield Himalayan. That was only a single cylinder so I only had to pay for one plug. It did help when starting from cold as it didn't need long to warm up and did take the lumpiness out of the throttle there was a marginal improvement in mpgs but not much. As for a bike with more cylinders I'm not sure I'm happy with how my tracer runs at present so I've no plans to change them.

[Snod Blatter]

I put some Denso iridiums in my CB250 and they only lasted 7000 miles before the resistance was so high that the spark was crawling down the porcelain instead. Compared to the copper NGKs that went before them which did 25K I don't really see the point.

Also, just like Geraltimush's CRF, my Z250SL comes with a fancy iridium plug with platinum internals which has a service interval of 32K. I've had no problems with it so far at 21K, but good job too because it's a specialist part and quite expensive!

[fastbob]

If you visit the NGK website you will see that there is ONLY ONE claimed benefit to using Iridium plugs and that is their greatly increased resistance to spark erosion which greatly prolongs their service life . So Gerontious has it spot on and anyone who is looking for performance gains has not done their research .

[MikeHorton]

If you visit the NGK website you will see that there is ONLY ONE claimed benefit to using Iridium plugs and that is their greatly increased resistance to spark erosion which greatly prolongs their service life . So Gerontious has it spot on and anyone who is looking for performance gains has not done their research .

 

Sounds about right I didn't need to worry about changing it bit it did make a big difference in startup didn't need time to warm up like the original Bosch plug did

[Bender]

If you visit the NGK website you will see that there is ONLY ONE claimed benefit to using Iridium plugs and that is their greatly increased resistance to spark erosion which greatly prolongs their service life . So Gerontious has it spot on and anyone who is looking for performance gains has not done their research .

 

No you won't get performance gains from a sparkplug standard ones are speced to do what they need to do at a cost.

If however you make enough mods to something and take standard plugs out of there comfort zone, especially on forced induction then going to iridium is a no brainer.