Hey y'all, I have inherited my dads truck, a 99 dodge ram 2500 5.9l gas 4x4. It's a mess y'all, he seems to have put bandaids on broken bones. I recently replaced the plenum gasket and the intake gaskets,and the front main seal. Now everything went back together perfectly and was driving it was running a little ruff but nothing to bad just a few vacuum sound here and there. We haul water so we went to get a load of water and coming back it did great however the next day we go out to start it and we have a crank no start. Pulled plugs and found wet fouled plugs in all 8 and only 8,6,3 were black at the electrode. When taking the cap off and placing the #1 piston tdc my distributor rotor seems to be pointing to the number six position... Can someone help me to know what is going on and quite possibly how to fix it?

This is the distributor after making sure #1 was at tdc

 

Well the firing order is 1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2 so there's a good chance you're on tdc of the exhaust stroke. The FSM has a procedure to install the distributor that gets it typically good enough to get the engine to run. Doublecheck your distributor clocking. Lastly, turn it a little in either direction and see if it starts. While the distributor does not determine ignition timing (that comes from the crank position sensor) it does synchronize the injector firing with the cylinder being on the intake stroke. Now all this assumes that you actually have a spark, so check that first.

 

On what stroke? Needs to on the compression stroke! Then the distubutor should look like this.


Also what's the cap look like? What plugs are you running?

 

If you were able to haul a load of water the previous day and it was fine, first thing to check is to have someone crank the engine over and verify the distributor is turning, my first thought was that it jumped time. I don't think it would run very well with the distributor being 180 off, I could be wrong, though. Just for the heck of it, see if no. 1 spark plug wire goes to the post at 180 from where it should be. But the other comments about what stroke the piston is at is more likely.