Bought a vaccuum gauge. All vaccuum was good except to the EGR valve. I had vaccuum going to the transducer but not through to the EGR. Replaced the EGR sensor. Tested vaccuum through the transducer and it is now good. I will have to wait and see until tomorrow morning whether this is fixed or not. I have driven all over town this afternoon of course. The weather is in the 80's.

 

i would suggest if you can, to watch the vacuum when you start, assuming the weather is cold enough in the morning to cause the problem.

 

Problem is back this morning. Pulled the plugs, cylinders 2,3,4,& 5 are black and wet. Cylinders 1 & 6 look fine. I am going to treat this as a timing problem then go from there. This truck had a new timing chain put on about three weeks ago. I don't remember if my cold weather running like crap problem started before or after the timing chain. The EGR valve was bad but did not make any difference for this problem. Off to find the timing light!

 

A bad coil, distributer cap+rotor, or wires, plugs. Time to do a tune up.

 

sounds like you are off to the same start ours was at a month ago. We had no codes, so went the cap, rotor, coil, plugs, wires route with no gain.

we did find something today on ours that may affect the timing. you might want to check yours.
When checking the cap/rotor/cam sensor group again today, i was moving the rotor to check and found that in one direction the rotor shaft had about 1/8" movement side to side. Also we found some oil in the dist base. The thinking is that the rotor shaft bushing is worn and allows rotor to change position a tiny bit. We went to pickapart this pm and pulled a dist base that was dry and had shaft endplay but no side to side.

 

I went through all my under hood connectors and cleaned and reconnected all of them 2 years ago. Afterward signal lights all worked and lit brightly. They hadn't been. Truck seemed to run better and started easier in all temperatures until later. One day it quit as I pulled into a local gas station. Wouldn't start. I replaced the fuel pump. Still no start. Then I noticed (embarassingly) I accidently bumped the coil high tension lead trying to reach a connector and the lead fell out of the coil. I pushed it in tightly and it's been fine ever since. Check all the connectors.

 

04 dakota cold misses under light throttle, does not miss under heavy throttle warm or cold,no miss when fully warmed up. Any ideas?

Thanks,

relford@netzero.net

 

This is exactly what happened to mine. I changed out part after part to no avail and finally noticed the shaft play. No side to side play, just over rotated. I had it checked and the gear (oil pump drive gear) was completely shot. There is a TSB about this, very common on 92's.

My truck finally runs great.

Mine started out just like the threadstarters too, with it doing it only in the cold and finally all the time.

Thread starter:
Remove the distributor cap and grasp the rotor and using a rotational motion, check the total clockwise/counter-clockwise movement at the rotor tip. If the rotor tip movement is 5.0 mm (3/16") or more

http://dodgeram.info/tsb/1993/18-08-93.htm

 

Earlier I posted that I had checked vacuum and it was good everywhere except the EGR valve. I did not have vacuum at the fuel pressure regulator but did not put that in the post since I got bad information from the dealer regarding vacuum at the fuel pressure regulator. I took the truck in to the shop and guess what they told me, no vacuum at the fuel pressure regulator. They pulled vacuum from another source. The truck no longer died or ran really bad in cold weather but something else was amiss. It ran rough and idled high. I took throttle body off of truck last weekend and bought a rebuild kit. Cleaned all vacuum ports with throttlebody cleaner. While the throttle body was off decided to replace vacuum hoses, much easier with it off. Put throttle body back on and used the original port for the fuel pressure regulator. Truck is no longer missing, but still idles high. Found prcedure for idle adjustment in my book and set the idle to the correct rpm. The truck runs like new. I have now driven it the last week, even in cold early morning weather and it has been running great.

 

how do you adjust the rpm?