HPI Savage Engine and glow plug troubles...please help!
 

Hey guys so please bear with me as I am fairly new to this. I have a HPI Savage with the .25 engine. It has always run fine, and then went unused for a while (put after run oil in before putting it away). When I pulled it back out I got it running and had to do some tuning, to the best of my abilities after scouring forums and videos on proper tuning, and I think I have it dialed in fairly well. Was running it and the engine died and notice my glow plug was done for, so I put the spare I had in and went out to run again. Got it started and ran a couple minutes before I got another dead plug.

Did some research into what type of plug I should get and bought another one. Put it in ran it, and it was running pretty good...really cold that day and I noticed it wasn't hitting high enough rpms to shift, and the engine was running pretty cold. To my knowledge that means its too rich (because a lean engine runs hot, and if your running rich you can bog your top end) so I leaned out the top end a little bit, and was running and shifting like a dream. My friend wanted to time a base run, so I lined up and on go hit the gas, engine died immediately: dead plug. I don't know why I keep blowing plugs, but I'm getting tired of it.

One more question (sorry this is so long): when trying to start the savage (I have a Roto Start) it can sometime take a bit, and I'm not getting good compression on every rotation...when you listen to the engine trying to turn over it goes in and out of nothing, then having compression again, then nothing. Is that my engine going out, or someone told me it could be my one way bearing, but I don't know how to check if that's the problem or not.

Thank you so much for your help!

What brand of glow plug are you using? Buy quality glow plugs! os, nova, are probably the best out there IMO. I use os religiously without issues. When tuning, you should be tuning your lsn along with your hsn. Sounds to me you might be to lean on hsn and to rich on lsn. A good rule of thumb that works for me on various engine is, set your idle gap at .5 to .7mm. Thats about half the thickness of a credit card. After that, DON'T touch it again. Now, use your lsn to set your idle. This process in my experience gets your lsn in the ballpark... Good luck!:tire::tire::tire: