2007 Ram: Replace the engine or replace the truck ?

[1STMP]

And another thread unravels......

 

[eldubb440]

my bad....... carry on

 

[Kern Dog]

And another thread unravels......

 

[1 Wild R/T]

And another thread unravels......

 

[Kern Dog]

The engine still runs great. The transmission shifts fine. You'd never know the miles on it if you didn't see the odometer.
I must have bought a "Wednesday build" truck on accident.

 

[1STMP]

my bad....... carry on

I Was only joking. Not bad on your part.
I've seen a lot of threads here just kind
of wither and die.

 

[RemCharger]

The first thing that I actually did was to put a breaker bar on the crank pulley bolt. It spun but then stopped. I reversed and tried it backwards and got the same thing. Something was stopping it from spinning in a specific spot. There wasn't a hole in the block with a rod hanging out, so I looked at the valve train. Check out the excessive clearance at this rocker arm.

View attachment 1162994
I was able to pull the rocker away from the valve tip even more by hand. This led me to look into the intake port.....

View attachment 1162997

Yep, the dreaded intake seat failure!

View attachment 1162998

You can see the break in the seat in the above picture, The machined area where the seat is supposed to be was banged up a bit too. Surely it is repairable but I'm going to pass on this one.
I'm surprised though. Did the engine fail THEN they wrecked....OR did the engine fail and they faked a wreck to get the insurance money ?

I'm not surprised. You nailed it. On the latter.

 

[ckessel]

Yesterday I took the truck to my axle guy.




I have pretty good luck in many situations. THIS was one of them.




The axle that I brought to my axle guy was a 2002 or 2003 that I pulled from a self serve junkyard here in CA.
I was tempted to just swap the entire axle myself since the inside looked fine and the gears felt nice and tight.
My axle guy said the differential case was wasted....it had started to grind away at the main caps. The ring and pinion were fine though since any shavings that were worn off got collected by the magnet in the housing.
He took the 3.92 gears and just swapped them to my axle in the truck. My differential was still fine. He says that many of these Dodge 9 1/4 axles with the limited slip differentials have that flaw where these bolts in the case that back out and grind away at the main caps. Even at 375,000 miles, mine is still tight and quiet.
The 3.92 gears are just as quiet. The low speed throttle response is better. It feels like I don't need as much throttle input to get it up to speed. It does accelerate faster at WOT.
The cruising rpms are not that much more than before. At 75, it was turning 2200. Before, it was around 2000.
The axle guy only charged $400 to inspect the donor and to swap the gears over.
If I would have just swapped the whole axle over myself, I would have had a bad differential, damaged housing and main caps and still had to take it to the axle guy.

When I was working at the dealers, it was fairly common to see the diff housing getting gouged out on the caps. What was going on was the stamped steel, hardened of course, retainer for the clutch packs would get loose and start backing out. Like a cutting tool in a lathe. I was servicing my diff at work one day, 94 1500 2x Ram and saw it just getting started. Had to scramble around to find a new carrier to replace it. Turned out that the one I found, it was a P part unit for the 9.25, was a different style and did not contain that retainer that liked to slip out causing havoc. It was also common on the 9.25 to have pinion and carrier bearing problems so we always kept a good stock on hand. We got to where we could hear a bearing job coming when the customers drove into the service driveway. Same situation on Cat rattles and 3.3/3.8 minivan water pumps.

 

[5.7 hemi]

I had to replace the pinion bearings on my 98’ 1500 4x4 on the rear. It sounded like I had a straight cut gear drive instead of a timing chain.

 

[zyzzyx]

So, what you guys are telling me is that the 5.7 will destroy the cam & lifters at around 110k miles,
and then at some point the hardened valve seats will start to fall out, and if that doesn't get you the rear
differential will machine itself to a pile of chips? I thought I had it bad with my Ferd 6.0!

 

[1STMP]

So, what you guys are telling me is that the 5.7 will destroy the cam & lifters at around 110k miles,
and then at some point the hardened valve seats will start to fall out, and if that doesn't get you the rear
differential will machine itself to a pile of chips? I thought I had it bad with my Ferd 6.0!

Without knowing the history of the vehicle
it's difficult to pinpoint the actual cause of
the failures. The engine KD was looking at
could have been in a car that was stolen
and had been run extremely hard. I had a
vehicle that suffered the same fate. The
same could be said for any make of
differential if they're run through the wringer
and abused. Just my .02....