Master Techs have a hard gig. They may get the top hourly pay at the shop but they also get stuck with the jobs that require the most time and knowledge to fix and those are often the jobs that pay the least. Warranty claims departments nor customers want to pay the technician for the 40 minutes or more of road testing it may have required to duplicate and isolate the source of a noise or experience an intermittant problem and then re-road test it to confirm the repair. They don't mind spending the money for a five minute repair of a broken wire, but they don't want to spend the 3 or 4 hours it took to find the broken wire and R&R the dashboard to get to the broken wire. Much of the good-paying cash work goes to the "B" techs that make less per hour than the Master Tech. The Master Tech gets stuck with a lot of warranty work, which pays less time than "customer pay" work, and he has to back that warranty work up by getting the Primary Failed Part # so the writer can properly pay him for the claim, get TSB #'s as they apply, get incident report #'s for those repairs that required Tech-line assistance and make sure time is clocked in and out on the back of the repair order. Sometimes there is just as much time in the paper work as there is in the repair! That's not to mention the hours of training involved nor the time spent assisting other techs in the shop who will seek their advice when they get "stumped" on a car! Very few Master Techs get paid what they are worth...

I am actually about to have a mechanic switch out my spark plugs on saturday, he will charge me somewhere around 60 $ to do that. I would have done it myself but it honestly looks like a pain to get the engine shroud and air intake off on the 05, then the coil packs have to be removed.... I just dont feel like doing it. my previous vehicle was an 02 merc. mountaineer.... that was a pain in the butt to change out the plugs because they were conveniently placed at the bottom sides of the engine, genius. I was quoted 150 $ at the local grease monkey for pf spark plug replacement. the ngk iridium plugs were 12 $ each x6, as for shocks, you could try to tackle that yourself but you would probably need a shock compressing tool and some knowledge on how to do that type of job. luckily I have a cheap mechanic , about 200 $ in labor for shocks + 475 $ for the parts. would the dealership ever let you get away with purchasing parts from another source other than their dealership? 1600$ is a bit steep but when you think about it like this, to replace my drivers door handle mechanism and locking cable (froze and snapped) it cost 350 $, appalling. it might be worth your time/money to find an independent mechanic for the work your trying to get done, but you will at least have piece of mind with the dealership and probably some kind of guarantee, but it will come at a price.

You can actually replace the spark plugs on the VQ40DE without removing the upper plenum. It's a bit tricky and takes some patience and the right tools, but it can be done. I've done them both ways.

It's not worth the aggravation of NOT pulling the intake. It's an extra 3 minutes of work and saves you from throwing something!

I didn't save much time the first time I replaced the plugs without pulling the intake because I had to figure out how to do it and which tools to use, but now I can do a set of plugs on a VQ40DE in 30-35 minutes. To change plugs while pulling the intake takes me around an hour and a half.

I just pop the plenum bolts out and use a bungee cord to the hood to hold it up just enough to make it easy. I don't pull the whole thing off