My grandpa left me his truck when he died in 08, it has sat without running for a year due to misc. issues. I now have enough experience working on trucks that i feel able to work on it. Today i put a new battery in it and turned it over and it fired right up and died, i repeated this process until it just cranks over and doesnt start. I checked the coils for spark, im about to crack the fuel lines and see if they are full of air or water, problem 1 that i know for certain is that it has a full to 3/4 tank of year old gas, how do i pump the tank the easy way so that i dont have to drop the tank? any help is welcome, everything else works from what i can tell, but the last time i drove it the speedometer wasnt working intermittently.

 

I would suspect bad gas. You can siphon it out the old fashioned way, you can buy a siphon pump made for gas, or you can drop the tank.

 

What JK said above. Other option is also to lift off the bed if it is a regular or extended cab (quad cab doesn't get that luxury).

It looks like you're not far from College Station. There are quite a few Dakota people between there and Houston. I'm up in Fort Worth, but I don't have any trips south planned at this time.

 

So this is strange and you will probably know the reason for it. I put my battery on to charge up to proper voltage and turned the key when my mom got home and it fired right up. runs smooth if not smelly from the dead gas, but otherwise its perfect. I ran into a new problem, i have a no bus code on my odometer, i plugged in my obd2 scanner and it said it was a no bus trans code but i have no clue how to fix it. My gauge cluster is dead, the lights turn on m=but i have not tach, speedo, or other guages. Im gonna check for blown fuse for the cluster since i know where it is but if that doesnt fix the problem what should i do? i need to have the truck up and running by the end of this month or the very beginning of next month so i can get a real job instead of work for my dad. BTW, i never mentioned this but it has the v8 magnum 4.7l with 230k ish miles on it. i dont know about the trans. Thanks for the replies

 

I pulled the 3 connections off the pcm and looked inside then and there was brown goo on inside the female connector for the one closest to the cab. I sprayed 91% isopropyl alcohol on all 3 and i will wipe them out in about 30 minutes. I doubt this is my problem but maybe itll fix it? it cant hurt to try

 

Since you solved this problem and started another thread on your no buss issue, this thread will be closed. No need to have two different threads going to discuss the same issue.