Recently my Dakota had a nuclear event, overheating, boiling over the coolant, coolant being purged from the engine. I had parked the truck for a few weeks I til I had time to look it over. It looks like the water pump failed, pretty hard to turn with the belt off and the belt looks glazed. I replaced the water pump and checked for combustion gasses, found no trace of combustion in the cooling system.

When I got the truck up to temp though, the gauge never really moved off cold. I had unburnt fuel coming out of the exhaust too so I replaced the sensor. Still no gauge but no smoke. Did a cluster sweep test and the gauge fully sweeps. No check engine light. Engine temp using a scanner is 195.

So the message is being scrambled. How does the temperature message reach the cluster? What modules does it go through?

 

It goes through into the PCM and then onto the PCI bus to your cluster.

Are you sure you have gotten all the air out of the system? The sensor might be in a pocket of air.

Otherwise, I'd start with replacing the sensor.

 

I just replaced the sensor but there could be an air pocket since I just got a code for thermostat performance. I'll probably replace the thermostat too.

 

If OBD2 is saying 195 but the gauge is showing cold, something's not matching on the commbus

 

To update this post, I believe it's a stuck/bad thermostat. This was the max temp the truck got to tonight. Ignore the trans temp pids lol.