This is a long step by step story so bare with me. This past weekend some friends and me decided to go camping/boating at one of the local rivers and I volunteered to pull their boat sight unseen. This boat, only 23ft ended up being very heavy I'd say at least 7000++ combined with the trailer, and I did not expect it to be that heavy. The place we went to had about a 4 mile steep descent down into the river, and of course on the way out I had to pull those steep hills at about 85 degrees outside. Well, pulling the first 2 miles of hill the old girl immediately did not like it. Speed limit was 55 and all I could do was 35 in 2nd gear and accumulated cars behind me. During this time the engine got very hot on me, within 2 needle widths to red line. I knew this first hill would level out soon up ahead so I fought through it and made it up and pulled over to let it cool itself off. During this time now I started to smell burning plastic so I popped open the hood and the plastic covers that my mechanics put over the spark plug wires were melting and dripping on the exhaust manifold. I've always forgotten to take those things off before this happened. This was the embarassing part...my dodge with a boat behind it stopped on the side of the road with the hood up while Ford's, GM's and even Toyota's pulling boats were passing us by. So I plucked the plastic deals off as much as i could and a few burns on my arms later we were ready for the second hill. This time when it started to heat up again I kept the tranny in first and that cured the engine from getting very hot again but I was still running pretty warm, that's expected on a hill though. We made it up that final hill and didn't have to stop to let it cool down again, I just kept driving and it quickly got back down to normal temp. So just thought I'd share my embarassing weekend with all of you. Thanks for reading if you made it this long

 

edited----- he pulled very heavy boat uphill, truck was weak, overheated and melted plug wire covers

 

Don't sweat it man. I had my embarrassing day yesterday: https://dodgeforum.com/forum/2nd-gen...ing-brake.html

 

that sucks, sorry to hear that. at least nothing broke ^.^