Check 'em anyway. Just to be sure. Verify BOTH ends of the wires. Also, check out the TSB for wire routing in the faq section. It sounds like you are firing a cylinder out of sequence, and that will give you the behavior your describe.

 

ok, im going out to look again right now

 

checked the order, it checks good. not per the tsb but it should fire shouldnt it? on another note i gave it another shot when i was out there and it fired for just a second then died but it was real rough feeling. also when i try to crank it it will die down like i been saying and inside i can hear a click under the dash and every time i hear it click it will kick the starter over one more time. very slowly.

 

im still going to say crank position sensor. just because it doesnt have any crimped wires, doesnt mean anything. mine didnt appear to have any crimped wires, but the second i got it out i looked and sure enough it had a crimped wire. its easy enough to change and only takes about 15-20 minutes.

 

I agree with crank position sensor. I had one go bad in a chevy lumina (not as easy to get to in those) but I did like you, spent a long time and alot of money trying everything and still had problems, even paid a shop $80 diagnostic fee to tell me they thought it was a bad fuel pump which I then spent an afternoon replacing after I paid the towing fee to get it back home. I finally I started really racking my brain, sat down and thought about the basics and what the engine needed to fire up and run. I methodically started checking everything 1 at a time. When I got to the sensors I tested/inspected the expensive ones and replaced the cheap ones. As soon as I removed the crank sensor I saw a crack that would have been hidden without actually removing the sensor, once I replaced it the car ran like a dream.

 

any updates?

i know that an ASD shutdown will trigger when there's no signal from crank position sensor. that cuts power to fuel pump and coil. i've never heard of it cutting power to the starter or somehow reducing voltage.

the 8.5 volts sounds like a dead battery, but i'm confused by how it instantly recovers to 12 volt after an ignition off/on cycle.

so have you tried jumping it from a good battery. see what happens...

 

Could the starter have a bad ground? Do you have a chipped key but not the right key (my friends ford would just crank over a couple times because he used a copied key, but I'm not sure if any of these rams came with chipped keys)

 

Rams didn't have chipped keys till SentryKey came out in 02 for the 3rd gen Rams.

 

Nvm I don't know then, are you absolutely sure it's not the battery, and have you switched batteries with another car just to make sure

 

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