How is your engine harness? It could be possible that your wires aren't all perfect. Kinda hard to test the harness but with some patience, a repair manual, a good electrical tester, and maybe a helping hand you can do this.

Also, if you have another dodge ram sitting around, you can pull the harness and try using that one. You might be able to get away with hooking it up only to the PCM, engine, electrical box under the hood and the cab to test things out. It might be worth it if your not a pro at finding electrical problems. Switching that harness may save you some trouble.

If you do decide to check the connections, what you should be looking for is that no water, corrosion, dirt, etcetera got into the connections. You should look for voltage at the sensors based upon what a repair manual states the sensor should be receiving on a specific colored cable coming from the harness when the key is in the on position, and you should be looking for continuity between where the harness connects to the pcm and the end of that specific wire you are testing.

Troublesome process that may seem tedious but often times the right thing to do if replacement parts aren't easy to find or if your not 100% sure where exactly to look because you can test one thing at a time to eliminate possibile factors. Personally though, I'd try pulling the harness from the other truck and hooking it up to everything under the hood of the one you are trying to start since you have that other truck sitting right there and testing connections is a pain.

And once again, what exactly happened to start this whole fiasco? And have you tried putting a water bottle filled with gas with a sport top cap or some holes in the cap of the bottle so that the gas will be dripping into a funnel lodged into the throttle body bore to get the truck to start while you crank it? If you can start the truck like that, remove the bottle, and keep it running just by using a foot on the gas pedal then you know that you still have some adjusting of that distributor to do to get things synchronized again. And are you absolutely certain that the distributor has been seated and installed properly? If not, make sure everything is tight and that things are lined up properly before going on some more.

Word of caution though, make sure to be extra careful and to have a hose around incase gas backfires through the trottlebody if you do decide to try that gas in a bottle thing. People have been sprayed by flaming gas before for not taking enough precaution to be safe and caught on fire because of that. Good idea to have someone around to help out with all this stuff and for safety sake.

 

I've checked over the harness as much as I can but it's the insides that count, right? I've been checking the inputs/outputs with the key on but it's hard to check those things while cranking when it's just me out there. Where's Stretch Armstrong when you need him? The connections all look good, in any case. I'll switch out the harness as a last resort but the OBD cable's on its way so I wait a day or two for that to show up first.

Not sure what happened to start this whole chain of events. The truck came to me this way. It's in great condition otherwise, it just has this one little problem of not running. Otherwise, it's a great truck....

I'll try the gas bottle thing tomorrow. It sounds like a more elaborate method of what I've been trying: putting some gas in in the throttle body and seeing what happens when I crank it. It has made absolutely NO difference when I've tried this the 6 or so times I've tried it but maybe the 'metered' approach with a bottle will work better. I'll have some water around...the hose will freeze on me as it's a bit cold here in MN! I'll let you know what happens and thanks for the help -- this mystery will get solved one way or another (hopefully with my truck NOT burning down in my driveway).

 

You said that you took your PCM from a spare vehicle of yours? 1998 Ram? Did you make sure to disconnect the battery from both trucks when taking out and putting in the PCM? If the battery was connected you could have fried the PCM just like that. I did that to mine and my old one that was sitting for a while not being used somehow went bad. I hate to suggest this again but you might want to try another PCM. 96-2002 should at least work to start the engine. sensors wont read right but that wont make a difference if your just trying to get the truck started. Also, double, triple, quadruple check the distributer. Your going to get this eventually and its gonna be something simple. Bad Computer, wires, timing/synchronization, blah blah blah. This type of thing is a real pain in the ***. Probably one of the reasons so few people are commenting on this. But if nothing is standing out as obvious and you are checking all the possiblities maybe its time to start going back over things that you may not have done 100% right the first time.

 

Yes, the spare was from a running 98 5.9l Ram and it worked just fine in that truck both before and after I tried it in the 99 5.2l. The batteries were disconnected (in fact, I have just one battery that I use for both trucks) so there was no power connected at the time. I'm on my tenth or so check of the distributor and before checking again (laying on top of the engine with my head wedged back there with a mirror to see what the alignment is up to) so I'll keep checking everything I can. I may end up pulling the entire distributor out of the running engine, wires and all and putting it into the bad engine. Won't take too long but I'll be marking the crap out of the distributor before I take it out of the running engine, that's for sure.

I'll keep posting the progress here since I've been reading all the history of other threads looking for that one nugget that will get me running...it all goes in the database! I think there'll be that one or two things that get me there...the old coil being bad is one thing but I know from experience that you have at least four times the trouble when there are two things wrong (probably more like ten times) but since there's no code, the computer thinks that everything's in the range of ok, at least.

BTW, changed out the MAP sensor with a known good one (again) and there's no difference. Onward!

 

Hey there, HeyYou:

I have the cable now and the software but it is having communication problems in that the software is looking through the serial port and the cable is USB. Is there a settings protocol that you used to get the computer to listen to the truck with this set up?

 

I haven't actually used it. I have the software package... but, no laptop..... (an no cable 50 feet long to reach out to my truck. There should be a configuration for it somewhere.......... Give me a little while, and I might be able to point you in the right direction.

 

Crap. it doesn't appear that software package supports USB cables......... There might be a way to have your USB port 'pretend' it is a serial port, methods vary by what version of windows you have...... There are also USB>Serial adapters, or PCMCIA cards with serial ports........

 

I've tried the various methods of having a USB port emulate a serial port but the software doesn't seem to want to cooperate. Thanks for the reply...wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

From the looks of it, I should be able to find freeware that will do the job. I'll post here what I find and be sure to let me know what you find, too.