Daily Driver Maintenance

Figured I would document this here, my daily driver is a 99 Ram 1500 sport. Since I have owned it the truck has consumed about 1-2 quarts of oil every 5000 miles and the spark plug in cylinder 8 would get oil fouled around 8k-10k miles. A compression test showed a pretty even 150 in all cylinders, so I suspect a valve guide may be leaking. The plenum gasket is also a suspect for leaking. Tonight I started tearing down the engine so I could take the heads to get rebuilt.

 

Those heads crack if you look at them wrong.

 

My understanding has been they basically are all cracked even from the factory but it usually dead ends into nothing and as a result they will still hold pressure. Unfortunately theres not really any smog legal aftermarket options in CA, and even then this engine is not worth putting $1500 worth of heads on.

 

Don't know Dodge but the ford plastic plenums had a nasty habit of leaking, including putting coolant into the oil.

 

I have a lot of experience with those magnum engines and have drag raced a lot of them. There is a lot of cheap performance to be gained in those things pretty easily. I keep hearing about cracked heads with them, but I never had an issues in the 7-8 I have had.

 

Factory RT heads are the only smog option... fortunately, they can be found pretty easily in most junkyards with some patience.

 

Initially I was told by the machine shop that they could rebuild my heads and have them turned around in 1 or 2 days. Unfortunately the mag test revealed some large cracks going all the way into the water jackets on each head, rendering them unusable. I got a set of new heads ordered, these ones were a new casting that is supposedly thicker and not prone to cracks like the stockers. This ended up delaying my whole project about 7-10 days and adding an extra $500 to the cost.

While I was waiting on the new heads, I went ahead and tackled some other needed work. I started with removing the dash in order to change the heater core. The faint smell of coolant during the winter was a warning sign my heater core may have a leak.

I was very surprised to find the heater core was in far worse shape than I expected, it was a good thing I decided to replace it.

There was also a mild oil leak coming from the area of the rear main seal, another fun job to do.

I replaced the rear main seal and cleaned up the oil pan while I had it removed. I was glad to find there was no sludge in the pan or the rest of the motor really, I think this truck has had pretty consistent oil changes it's entire life.

 

Finally on thursday the new heads arrived and the shop quickly got the valves set up for me. First thing saturday morning I got to work putting the engine back together.

The intake manifold on these engines was huge, and not very aesthetically pleasing. I had some thoughts of replacing it with something aftermarket, but they almost all result in lost torque compared to the stock keg.

Finally I got the accessories, fan, and fan shroud all done sunday afternoon.

I started the truck up and went on a drive for a while, and it definitely runs much better. The truck has 135,000 miles currently, so hopefully I should be set for another 100k without too many issues.

 

That blows about heads. Is that a factory dash? Looks real clean. I like those second gen ram trucks.

 

The dash is original and luckily the first owner stuck a dash cover on right after purchase. It had very minimal cracking until I tried reinstalling it, and a large crack split right down the middle on me.

The dash cover hides the damage luckily, but the 2nd gen dashboards are so brittle.