And the spring glamour pics:
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And this was the most recent taken this weekend at the Warren truck Plant with the TDR tour we did there.
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Thought it was time that I updated the 1990s history and shenanigans from 2015. The 1990 and I had a couple of incidents that followed the general theme that if you pay attention to your truck, and notice the small things, it can prevent you from being stranded roadside.
At the end of the day, a truck is a machine (although a machine with a personality, and that makes it a mix of part woman, and machine, so that can add a new element to diagnosing intermittent issues, but I will leave that conversation for another day lol :D) . So a truck is like a machine. It is based on gears, nuts, bolts, and everything has cause and effect. If you do X, Y will follow. I had two major failures summer 2015 and both of them could have left me far from home on the side of the road. But with enough gauges, some common sense, and a bit of luck due to the understanding that strange things “don’t just happen” and therefore always have a reason; think through it and see what is starting.
The first of the two incidents happened in early May when the truck had only been on the road for about 2 weeks. I went to do my first run of the year to get a parts truck. So hooked up the float, and on the road I went! Was a 5 hour round trip and the trip out to pickup my load went smooth. On the way home though, things started to go wrong.
I picked up this D350 out in Southwest Ontario and I stopped for a few pictures before getting onto the highway. I loved the way these shots turned out:
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While driving down the highway, I started noticing that I was down on power. Now, I am towing something that is 13’ tall and the aerodynamics of a hay barn. Well, it kinda is a barn on the back of that thing. Lol But watching my boost, it was too high even for that. I was running a steady 20 psi at 75 mph. Yes, I was weighing 24,500 lbs….. but it didn’t “feel” right. My gut told me something was wrong. I then noticed my read diff gauge was warming up. So I kept an eye on it as I boogied down the road. At 1.5 hours from home I started to cross the 200 mark on the diff temp….then 225. Now, I have never seen 225 on that gauge before. As I pondered why, I saw 230. Then 240. Then a short while later, 250. I had already backed my speed down to 60 mph as that slower speed should be less load on the diff, but the temp was still climbing. Then about 15 min later, I pegged the gauge.
Now, there is many gauges I like pegging, boost being the main one. But this is not good when its your D71 diff temp. At 260 where the gauge pegs, that already means bearings and oil are burning. I don’t even know the cause yet, but I now know I am doing a rebuild. 30 min from home the gauge is hovering at 255 as I baby the load down the road. Sick to my stomach by now, my head is running with possibilities. I pull into the driveway and unhitch in the yard. I pull the truck right into the hoist. Up it goes and I am terrified to see what is in there. I start with pulling the Mag Hytec dipstick out and I find something no one wants to see on their magnetic dipstick: this.
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So my heart sinks… off comes the pan…. Wow.
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So, I begin a full D71 rebuild. After disassembly, this is what I find. Seems I sheared off the carrier bolts and when they no longer held the carrier together, the spring load inside forced the carrier apart thus riding into the bearing support blocks. I am beyond lucky I made it home, didn’t break a pinion tooth, etc. But that began a month of weekends slowly cleaning shavings out of the entire banjo housing, new bearings, and rebuilding the carrier. Thankfully, the D70 and 71 carriers are the same so I could get a replacement. I was worried as these D71 parts are scarce.
In this photo you can see where the carrier bolts are rubbing the blocks.
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And all the bolts started coming out this way….
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They all started to look the same as they came out…
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The chunks on the paper towel were from the sides of the carrier, not the ring gear thankfully. You can see the missing material where the shiny machined surface is. The lower half should have a rib to hold that top part in.
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For example see here? Left one is there, right is half missing.
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Another view:
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Here you can see the bearing support block semi machined away from the bolt head.
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And the new carrier arrived! 🙂
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Pre heating the bearings prior to install so they slip onto the carrier easier:
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And finally the cleaned banjo prior to carrier install.
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Start of June the truck was back on the road with a bit of help from a cousin and a friend. And the shenanigans continued.
As the truck was down for a month for the axle, and I had an experienced B series tech in the garage helping with the axle build, I thought I would install the stage 1 fuel pin I have had sitting here for 3 years that had not gotten around to installing yet. So we pulled the pump apart, and 20 min later, went for a test drive. Changing nothing other than the stage 1 pin, I went from 35 psi boost to 43. Now we talkin!! 😀 With this Super 40, I also have the air to drive it so EGTs are a peak 1250 so that is likely not accurate for many other engines. Right where I like them!
So the month of June is going well. The truck is back on the road. The axle is good. I have more boost…. I am all smiles. But my engine wasn’t….It was quietly complaining. Plotting against me and my shenanigans. Or maybe, just giving me what I deserved after it held together best it could.
Now, this is where sometimes you can have all the gauges in the world but it pays to now your truck and to pay attention to the small things in life. I will walk you through here a major failure and hopefully it will save others from being stranded roadside. Roadside is a place for Chevies and Fords, not Gen 1 Dodges. 😀
Let’s set the stage:
Friday, 10:00 pm
Its 3 weeks after the axle incident and I come home from work on Friday night to find wet carpet on the passengers side. Great. I go looking and I see the heater box hoses are leaking.
Saturday 7:30 am
I wait till the following morning as it is not a bad fix, so I pop the rad cap to allow any excess liquid at the highest point in the system to bleed back as I don’t need to drain the rad as this wont leak much if the cap is popped. The repair was a 15 min thing, new hoses, and away I go. But something rubbed me wrong…when I popped the rad cap, I heard a chirp as air discharged. I didn’t like that and never heard that before in the 15 years I have gad this truck.
Saturday 8:15 am
Repair complete, 10,000 lbs trailer is hooked on, and I depart for a 13 hour drive. As I am driving it is eating at me….why did I have a leak now. That is too random. WTF? And it hits me. That air that leaked out of the rad cap…. It was pressurized. That is why it leaked out of the hose. I have a bad rad cap and it isn’t letting the air pressure out. So it found the hose that was the weakest link. I’m on it.
10:50 am
I stop at the last auto parts store for the next 4 hours for a new rad cap as after this, I am into Canadian wilderness. New rad cap on, I am all smiles, and I lean on the wick to make up for lost time.
12:48
I stop for lunch and do an under hood check to ensure all is good as I normally would after repairs. I open the hood and find this:
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Not a happy camper! Why would I have coolant all over? I shut engine off and check rad cap. Again, pressurized. Now hold on here…. Wtf? Brian starts running. That coolant came from the overflow tank…. I bad feeling starts to set in. I start the truck up and watch again. I can see the overflow bottle is unsettled. The occasional bubble forms in the tank. I eat lunch, wipe up splashed coolant, and decide to continue as planned.
2:01
I pull in for fuel and check under hood. I have a bigger mess than before. I don’t like this. I top up the coolant and continue to drive nicely with low boost as I am not getting a warm fuzzy feeling anymore.
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5:15
I arrive at destination, in the middle of PoDung nowhere, and let the truck cool while I grab flashlights and tools. I then start watching. The occasional bubble in the overflow is a much more frequent and bigger bubble now. See?
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Anyone following the issue yet? My brain started to connect the dots. Let’s revisit some things of the past here and do some thinking, shall we? I am sure you will enjoy this revisit to the past more than I did.
As mentioned, everything works the same way on a machine. Do something stupid, and it WILL come back to haunt you. That is just the way a machine works. You may THINK you got away with it, but at some point, some place, when it is least convenient, it will come back to bite you. This is why you must always be kind to your truck and if you do something stupid, be aware. Run gas in your diesel? May not see damage today but you will one day. Pyro too hot? May not have a sign today, but you will find that damage one day even though for the moment, you got away with it. Race a Chevy up a 8 mile long 7% grade hill in 2013 in 100F ambient with 10,000 lbs trailer while coming home from Carlisle PA car show and overheat the coolant at 235 deg F and cant cool it off again till you get home 6 hours away? I would bet I wouldn’t get away with that forever. Anyone remember that trip I wrote about earlier in this thread that resulted in the 2nd gen rad? Well, that day I cooked my head gasket unbeknownst to me making it brittle. I was warned this day might come but my feeling was I got away with it and was “lucky”. But that is not how a machine works…. 25 year old head gaskets are brittle. 25 year old head gaskets that are brittle don’t like 235 deg coolant. And head gaskets that are exposed to 235 deg coolant, and then 42 psi of boost thanks to the new fuel bin that has been liberally used on stock stretched head bolts, results in bubbles in the overflow bottle. That is also why on road under boost, there was enough pressure to spray it all over the underside of the hood.
So given this lovely news, I got many bottles of coolant, left trailer there, and drove the truck back staying under 8 psi boost the entire trip home. Remember, boost only creates more pressure and more pressure means more cylinder leakage. So with babying the truck, I made it home and into the shop it went. Over the next 3 weeks I collected all the parts I needed and by week 4, it was back on the road. The teardown went like this….
So I started with my assembled engine…
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Then started stripping down.
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Then I found this. Hmmm. Looks wet…. 🙁
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Wow. This is a lot of parts and I am not done yet!
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She is looking a bit bare now!
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Off she comes!
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Aaaaand this is what I found:
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Cylinder hone still looks great!
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But what is this back between cyl 5 and 6? That doesn’t look good!
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You can see on cly 6 on the bottom side of thw head it has some buildup:
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Closer inspection of the head gasket and you can see where the leak/blowby was happening:
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And one more shot of the rest of the parts that came off.
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Now, the build back up began. I started with cleaning down the deck, having the head decked, sonic checked for cracks (as the CPL 0804 head with the larger 9mm injector bores tend to crack over time due to the thinner material thickness in that area), cleaned, and a valve job. Once complete, the new ARP competition AH11 studs were installed into the block. This requires tapping the stud holes all the way to the bottom first.
Here is a look at the new vs old factory head gasket:
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And the gasket on the cleaned block deck:
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So the head was carefully lowered into place:
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Studs are installed!
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And then all of the parts started going on:
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For those who have never seen a non intercooled CPL 0804 9mm injector, this is what it looked like. You can see some of the rust from the bore on it. This was cleaned up as good as new prior to reinstall.
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And 30 man hours later, this is the result!
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That brings us to the rest of the summer. There was no other failures from July-October but I did log 18,000 miles in 4 months, most of it with a trailer behind! A few other shots from 2015:
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