Well today was a success!

Replaced plenum plate, gasket, cap & rotor, plugs & wires, timing chain and gears (double roller), and valve cover gasket's.

Painted the valve covers and the timing chain cover red, looks good. We didn't take off the fuel rail or I probably would have painted the kegger....

Seafoamed about 3/4 can through the brake booster this morning, the rest in the gas tank, also changed the oil.

Only had 2 mishaps when starting it after the work 1) forgot a connection on the back of the kegger, 2) Loose battery cable

other then that she started right up and runs great.

Pictures of the plenum and gasket will follow tomorrow, getting ready for party tonight!

Also, I was expecting some degree of sludge in the valve cover and timing chain cover, there was NONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Happy New Year's everyone!

 

I never thought about red valve cover gaskets before........I tend to leave them black! lol!

Hey, really glad it went well for you. If yours is like mine, it ran like a new truck after doing the same work.

Have a happy and safe New Year!

 

Well the valve cover's are red, the gasket's are blue (FelPro)

Honestly, my valve covers where is such good shape my brother in law was like, are you sure you wanna paint them red?

The guy who owned it before me really did take care of it...

 

Where are the pictures?

 

Uhh he said tomorrow!! To much drinky drink tonight to get em lol

 

how bad was theslack on timing chain , was it hard to replace ? and any noticeable power ? and whats your milage when you changed it out .

i have my timing chain for about a year now collecting dust in the living room lol

 

It's got just under 148k on it. I didn't do the FSM test for slack, but there was probably 1/2" or so, it was pretty well done.

My brother in law put it on but I watched, all he did was take off the old, and put the new on as to the factory timing picture in the instruction's, do the bottom first, you'll probably have to pull up a bit to get the cam sprocket on but it's to be expected.

We did a test run (to the store for party beer) and she's definitely more responsive. (With it being New Year's Eve we didn't wanna push our luck with any potential police cruising around.


We cheated a bit too, instead of taking the alternator and AC pump out individually, we just took off the pulley mount bracket/ac pump/alternator as one piece, zip tied it to the passenger side fender, didn't have to mess with the ac!

 

And Wh1t3NuKle is exactly right, probably the most annoying part of the process is getting the stupid fan off, putting it back's a PITA too, the shroud is really right in the friggin way, but you can't get the shroud around the fan if it's bolted on so......

We made a custom spanner tool to hold the pulley while we loosened the nut, took a beefy screwdriver (that would fit in the hole...) and bent it into a L and stuck it in the hole and rotated until it grabbed something, then the nut came off easy peasy.

Also, I've done timing chain replacement's before on my old Blazer, it has threaded holes on the harmonic balancer and normally we get by using steering wheel puller's, not so with the Ram since it doesn't have threaded holes but slots instead.

AutoZone wanted $75 for the rental tool that might work. One of our neighbors had the puller with the hooks for the slots, saved us a trip into town...

 

Balancers changed at some point, not sure exactly what year... (99 or 00 I think). My 96 had a pulley separate from the balancer, and I used what basically amounts to a steering wheel puller to get mine off.

 

[quote=stewie01;2681838]And Wh1t3NuKle is exactly right, probably the most annoying part of the process is getting the stupid fan off, putting it back's a PITA too, the shroud is really right in the friggin way, but you can't get the shroud around the fan if it's bolted on so......


quote]


I'll throw this out there. I had to trim the bottom of the shroud when the body lift was added, and allowed me to just undo the 4 bolts holding the shroud on and pulling it up. In 8 years it hasn't caused any cooling issues if that is a concern.