The Celica came up with an interestingly malady recently: for a couple of weeks I noticed that it had developed a quiet little ticking noise from the top end somewhere. Initially I thought it was just cam and / or valve wear, but towards the end of last week the noise became more pronounced and hence I stopped driving it until I had some time to take a look.
In the mean time I had a quick rummage around on the GT4OC web site to see if anyone else had experienced a similar thing, and interestingly they had.
It would appear the 3S-GTE engine has a habit of unscrewing its spark plugs over a period of a few thousand miles and, if you don’t catch it in time, can result in it blowing the plug clean out of the head! The ticking noise I was hearing was the number-three plug jiggling around under each power stroke. I’d torqued the plugs to Toyota specs when they were last changed, but it would appear that they need retourquing every 20,000 miles or so…
While I had the charge cooler off I decided to torque the other plugs down again as well, and bugger me if they all weren’t just finger-tight!
I’ve never heard of an engine trying to unscrew its own spark plugs before now: you learn something every day 
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