honda tech

A friend of mine has a 92 explorer he said it started running rough and making a pinging noise so he thought he would do a tune up on it. He replaced the spark plugs with autolites ( it had bosh plugs ) and the spark plug wires with wires from checker auto parts and it ran fine after that until he drove about 15 miles and he heard a loud noise from the engine compartment.Then it started running bad again. Come to to find out one of the new spark plugs had the center of it blown out, the threadas were still in the cyl. head and the rest of it was in the spark plug wire. So he put a new autolite plug back in drove it about 20 more miles and it did it again on another cyl. He called me to come and look at it and I could not believe what I was seeing two spark plugs that you can see all the way threw. I looked at the old plugs and 4 out of the 6 looked like they had a detenation problem with the spark plug missing some of the plug before the electrode. I put a old plug back in and drove it home and it ran fine no piging or missfire and since then I have put about 40 miles on it. He did say that he just filled up with gas not to long before it started pinging and running rough. Im guessing that the new plugs were defective, maybe not crimped tight enuff? and he might of got some bad gas causing it to burn hot. Has eneybody heard of detenation problem with the explorers. Im going to put a new set of plugs from the dealer in it. Is there a differance from the plugs you get from the dealer and autolites from a parts store?