I have a 98 Dodge Ram 1500 Sport with the 318ci. Im running mostly stock except for a Spectre cold air intake and straight pipe becasue it "feel off". The catalyst in the catalytic converter is also falling apart make it a smidge louder. I'm plannng on just taking the catalytic converter completely off since the truck will be coming up on 20 years and won't have to go through emissions anymore in MD. I'd like to do this but am afraid of burnin up the valves with the catalytic converter gone. I was told to change the gas to air ratio in the injectors. Is this true? Also I'd like to get a little bit more power and driveablity out of it. Any suggetions as to which tuners work best for the 98 Sports?

 

1. Taking the cat out can/will throw a code, especially if you leave either 02 unhooked
2. You won't burn valves. The job of cat is to burn pollutants out of the exhaust and many many people delete them for flow reasons (unless #racetruck waste of time and can actually hurt flow)
3. Gas to air ratio in injectors? I think what you were told is actually air/fuel ratio of what your engine is running by changing the injectors themselves. Bad idea. Just going to cause problems and stock injectors are perfectly fine from stock to 335whp.
4. PLENUM FIX and tune up before worrying about a tuner and power. You'd be surprised.


As for tuner suggestion. SCT by FlyinRyan is the best possible but is also the most expensive and a lot of money to spend on a stock truck. My suggestion is and Edge because the tunes are better than SuperChips, it has all the same features, and it allows you to monitor things like trans temp and things that your cluster doesn't show AND for about the same price.

 

id just go with a hemifever and tune to 91 or 93

 

Thanks for the suggestions man. I'll just do the tune up like suggested. I'll have to put off the tuner purchase since I scraped my paint off my front fender on a tree yesterday. Gotta get that done ASAP with all the salt in MD.

 

Hemifever is good. I like the tune and he has great customer service in my experience.

 

With the Edge, can you measure the tranny temp while going down the road?

 

uh...for a long time now that's been false. That may have been the case 3-4 years ago but anymore he's junk that can't tune for anything and blames the customer for his mistakes
Yes you can.

 

Never heard anything bad before this, what happened?

 

Well he never really did make his customers datalog so his tunes could actually be done right but few years ago he quit caring about us 2nd gen guys. His focus shifted to the newer stuff and when magnum guys do go to him he treats people with complete disrespect, goes back on his "unlimited revisions" package, blaims customers when their trucks dont run right with a cam and he can't get the fuel trims right. Ryan "FlyinRyan" Hogan got his start with the Dakota guys fixing hemifever tunes. He's become so successful in his tuning because he produces results with more power and reliability as well as increase in mileage often times because he has you datalog for custom tunes.

 

do you need to data log if your truck is stock with just bolt on mods?