How old is your battery?

 

its old'ish but its fully charged and hasn't died once

 

Might wanna have it tested. Even a weak battery can cause some interesting problems on these trucks.

 

i replaced the ignition lock cylinder and ignition switch on steering wheel and now it still dies initially in about the same amount of time as before but now i can start truck right up the first time then if i let it sit still the second time happens sooner, and by the third the truck starts shutting off sooner. unhooking battery for 5 minutes helps truck start sometimes but not all.

still can't figure out if i had an alarm at some point. can't find a picture of factory alarm. while looking around at wires i found a remoteless key entry that says genie in the duct. (might be for a house) but truck never seemed to need it for first year i owned it.

anyone know how to tell if i have alarm? or how to check if i have a sensor grounding out?

 

I see that you replaced the crank sensor. Is it a mopar one? Hey you will tell ya these beasts hate non-mopar sensors.

 

Why yes, yes he will.

Cleaning the throttle body would be a good 'free' place to start though.

 

i cleaned throttle body. i also let it idle (a couple times) to see how long it takes for the electrical to go out, the old and new computer seem to act identical.

the truck runs about 20-25 minutes then dies either a no-bus or a crank won't start then after 5-10 minutes it will start again then die faster until it is dieing about every 5-10 minutes and starting back up after 5-10 minutes. if i let it sit for 4 hours it will run about 15-20 minutes again.

this makes me think it is overheating, but if i leave hood open and block the heat from the engine from hitting the computer with some board insulation, there is no change in how long it takes to die. which makes me think it is not the computer overheating.

also the dealer doesn't sell parts on a vehicle this old. otherwise i would not have brought a solopcm computer. which seems to be a bad buy fyi.

 

Gotta be one of your other sensors. According to theory, once the engine starts, the cam sensor just doesn't matter any more. So, likely crank sensor..... If you have a scanner that can read live data, seeing what some of the other sensors look like when it won't start, might be enlightening.

 

thanks i'm going to try that next. i'm going to put back the old sensors to see if something different happens

i just had battery charged and tested, its good. voltage readings seem to indicate alternator is good.

anyone know if this could be a voltage regulator problem? still trying to figure that out. but my head lights do suck butt.

and i still have a ground i don't know where goes. but it doesn't seem to exist in other peoples trucks though it looks like the rest of the grounds. passengers side one ground to block one to cylinder head 3rd goes to ??? computer maybe?

lots of spliced wires under my driver side dash too, but the stalling isn't random so i don't see how it could be a wire.

i used an thinkobd 100 scanner and not sure how to interpret it. but i have no codes showing and not sure if this scanner can read sensors or not. only thing showing a fail is under the "on-board monitoring" - test 11 status fail / test 13 status fail / test 16, 16, 17, 19 and test 1A are all data pass. i'm clueless what this means.

 

update i took ya'll advice. changed the battery to a new one and at the same time i figured i'd relook at the sensors. however this time i decided to try and just clean the O2 ones first. after replacing battery and cleaning O2 sensors by soaking them in gas and spraying them with parts cleaner the truck took north of an hour to stall out. before this i had about 15 minutes before the truck got to operating temperature and the engine would stall out. it might be important to say it would stall no matter what speed i was going.

i'm going to clean the catalytic converter next and see if it last longer before stall. i'