I have a 2006 Ram 1500 Hemi, and just after filling up with fuel I got about two miles down the road and it began stuttering and I got a check engine light. I checked the error codes and got a P0301 for a misfire on cylinder 1. At first I expected it may have been bad fuel but after driving a little further toward home I checked the codes again and still only had the one code, so it's only a single cylinder. Am I right in thinking the other possibilities are plugs, coil, or fuel injector? I have a couple questions: 1) which cylinder is #1? and 2) can I test or rule out any of those components such as a coil pack or injector without specialized tools? Thank you!

 

Try swapping a coil pack from a different cylinder and see if the problem stays with cylinder 1 or if it follows the coil pack. Stopping to get fuel and having a problem come up after is typically an electrical component from heat soaking.

 

Or bad gas.

 

Thanks guys, I'll try swapping coil packs and see what that does, I did some more digging on the cylinder numbers and it looks like #1 is front driver's side. @HeyYou I know, I'm really hoping it wasn't bad gas I filled up a little over 20 gallons, but if that's the case and I can confirm it I will be having a chat with the gas station, I already gave them a call when it happened so they have a record of it in case that was the problem.

 

ok, I swapped coils between cylinders 1 and 3 and started it up, the misfire stayed with cylinder 1 so it's plugs. I picked up a full set of plugs and started changing them out, here's what I pulled from cylinder 1. I've never seen anything like that before. I'm not done yet, but I got through a few cylinders and the other plugs were definitely needing replacement but they were still gapped. I'm wondering if somehow MDS could have contributed to this? I haven't got to the other cylinders that are shut off by MDS so we'll see what those look like.

 

Any evidence that something hit those plugs? They got bent over somehow...... and that would definitely give you a misfire.....

 

I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary with that cylinder, although I didn’t have much visibility in there either, just one more situation where an inspection camera would have been useful

 

Excuse to buy a new tool?

 

Maybe 2 tools 😁. Time for a compression check starting with cyl 1.

 

Absolutely! I do have a compression tester but didn’t think to check that, not a bad idea.