Respectfully disagree with your opinion on drying plugs. I have cleaned and dried dozens of plugs without issue. Wire brush, sandpaper, at times just a rag; no problem. Cleaned several with gasoline.
And not meaning to be argumentative but modern fuel is very electrically conductive at much lower pressure and voltage than real petrol was.
Modern plugs do not have any glazing on the electrode insulator which renders mechanical cleaning very difficult.
The insulator on modern plugs is deeper that the old ones so you can not get to the bottom.
So yes while you can clean the metallic parts of the electrodes, you can not clean the insulator properly except with hot grit blasting or burning off.
Rubbing the 20% of the insulator that protrudes with a wire brush leaves metal streaks in the insultor which visibly becomes grey looking.
The grey colour is the steel from the end of your brush depositing on the electrode which then creates a conductine path around the node of the center electrode which effectivle defeats the purpose of having a porcelean insulator. This may or may not render the plug inoperative.
Sometimes you can remove a bit of baked on carbon on a oil fouled plug enough for it to work again.
I have probably cleaned 1000's of plugs in the past, but that is all behind me now because the fuels & plugs we get now days are nothing like what we used to get when I was learning how to do things mechanical.
Modern fuels burn hotter than the old days and modern engines burn a lot leaner so plugs have changed to comply with modern conditions.
Ask around your social circle and see how many of them has had a pug go bad, brand new right out of the box.
most think it was a bad plug due to poor quality control and just get another but this is not the case.
Each & every plug is tested on the production line then graded according to the results of the test then labled also according to the results of the test so no way to get a bad plug, brand new.
what happens is fuel deposits on the unglazed insulator and shorts out the plug.
Modern fuels do not evaporate like real petrol does so the plug never dries unless it is washed with a solvent to remove the fuel deposit then blown dry, or heated enough to vapourise the oil deposit.
For some fun we had a bet on how long a fouled plug I pulled out of an mates engine would burn.
Once we got it going, it burned ( like a candle ) for 17 minutes. I remember that very accurately because I lost $ 10.00 on the bet.
Now getting back to the actual problem and to the methodology of offering help on an open forum.
The OP has a problem which we are trying to help him overcome so any advice given must be 100% fool proof and not have any chance of introducing another variabe to the problem thus complicating the diagnosis / repair.
So it is fit a brand spanking new plug, thus eliminating plug earthing. One problem at a time.
He can keep the plug and try it latter on just in case it was not the root cause or a contributor to the problem.
