So I took my 98 dodge ram 1500 3.9 V6 on about a 200 mile round trip yesterday and made it there fine however on the way back the engine basically had a total melt down, it's throwing a p0302,p0300,p0301,p0303 and a p0305 code in addition to absolutely no power, barely will hold 45 mph on flat road, ungodly loud clattering coming out of both valve covers and dumping blue smoke out of the tail pipes. I just changed oil and did spark plugs, wires cap and rotor. The goon at autozone claims it needs a new cylinder head,head gasket, intake manifold gasket and oxygen sensor which doesn't make sense to me. What could have gone wrong? There's no water in the oil nor water blowing out the tail pipe. At 108xxx miles I'm surprised this all came up.

 

Are you burning oil? How's the plenum?

 

It lost about a quart of oil after this started, I changed the plenum at 96,000 miles before it gave me any issues

 

I'd re-check the plenum and if it's good, I'd lift the valve covers to see if anything obvious was causing the clattering, I'd also do a compression test just to see.

 

What does your oil pressure look like?

I agree on the compression test....

 

Since were finally getting some sunshine around here I'll check it out today, oil pressures about 31 at idle and was 75 psi at cruising speeds.