Started on my plenum last night, got the manifold off and took the steel belly pan off, the gasket came apart in like 8 different peices. There was some pooled up oil in there, that couldnt have been from the PCV, because it hasnt ran in a few days. Started to clean the gasket material off, its gonna take some more elbow grease around the water jackets.

I didnt realize all the crap that had to come off to get the manifold off haha

 

Here is a picture down the TB of my 1998 Dodge RAM 5.9 with 165000 miles on it. Does it look like the plenum is gone?

it looks oily but there is not a puddle of oil. At the moment the truck runs strong, no pinging and it uses about a quart of oil every 3000 miles. It averages about 13 mpg around town and 15 highway

A few years back it pinged going up hills and I could never find the problem but the pinging stopped after a while. Also on occassion a 1/2 quart of oil will "dissappear" seemingly overnight. I'm thinking the plenum gasket must have an intermittent problem.

 

Got my plenum done, there was oil pooled up in the bottom of it and the gasket came off in many pieces, so im assuming that was it, had to replace both of the temp sensors on the manifold but that was no biggie.

Anyways, now i have a problem where it will start up and run fine for a few minutes and then start missing like crazy and try to die, and i get a loud hissing/sucking noise from the throttle body. It will also do it when i come down to idle sometimes, Could this be my IACV going out again? I've had this problem before and i replaced the IACV and it fixed it more or less. It has only done it to me twice since i replaced it, now it tries doing much much more frequently. But it only happens at idle, and it goes away with the application of throttle

 

If it is idling down to low, you may have some restriction there... wouldn't hurt to have a look, and clean it if necessary.

 

Sometimes it idles fine, other times it'll barely run. But ill pull it out and clean what i can, when i had the throttle body off for the plenum, i cleaned the throttle body out fairly well with some TB cleaner, not to say any of the garbage got to the IACV plunger and dried up and left carbon deposits all over it, Ill probably get another one and new oil change while im at it. I dont want to run the oil thats in there for too long with all that gunk in it

 

I finally had a chance to sit down and upload some pics of my plenum project. Here's the link to the pics, http://photobucket.com/plenumpics My plenum gasket was actually intact. That kind of surprised me at 170,000 miles and as much oil as I had in the intake. My problem was the PCV valve apparently. I replaced it with a dealer one so hopefully that takes care of that.

 

PapaG -- Good work brother.

Is the truck running?

 

The gasket looks like it was still in one piece, but there are plenty of areas in the pic that it looks like it was leaking(along with a bad PCV maybe). Do you have a pic of the gasket taken off the steel plate? I would love to see that too, just for future reference.

 

Actually its all still in one piece so when I get home in a couple of days I will post some pics. Down in Knoxville for a few days working.

 

Thanks man. Yep its running great. After I got done it fired right up and runs a LOT better. Now time to move on to the next project on the list. Lol.