I recently purchased a used 2007 Dodge 3500 with the 5.9 Cummings Motor in it. It's a 4x4 long bed dually quad cab.
I am curious if anyone has any input on items that I will want to pay special attention to? Also preventative measures to ensure the truck stays in good working order?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Joe,

Congrats on the vehicle purchase and welcome to the forum. Best advice I can give is to follow the maintenance schedule in the manual. If you would like a build sheet for the truck, PM me the vin and I will send you one.

 

Thanks Chris! PM Sent.

 

I sent a build sheet to the email you provided.

 

Congrats and Welcome to DF!

The major thing to keep an eye out for is the front end, ball joints, u-joints, and the steering linkage. Get a good quality fuel filter such as the Baldwin PF7977 and change it about every 10k. If you have an auto, keep the fluid/filter changes up to date and dont go adding any tuners set to max or your going to have an expensive paperweight.

Oh, also theres no "g" in Cummins

 

Welcom to the DF u can learn a lot here

 

congrats on your new ride. if you really want to learn hoards of information about your truck, you will want to visit cumminsforum.com

its a site that's all about dodge trucks with a cummins engine. it gets 100x more traffic than the cummins section of this site. I can be on there all day long and not even come close to staying on top of new posts. lot of great people over there that are very helpful. members also organize dyno events sled pulls, and general meet ups in the different state sections as well.

lot of active sponsors on there that are all about the diesels, and we even got one of our sponsors who's like a mad scientist (carl aka turbolvr) who's obsession with turbo's has come up with any kind of compound twin kit you could want, triplet kits, and his latest is compound twins + supercharger working together...and he actually gained fuel economy with the supercharger on there and now has 5psi of boost at idle. truck leaves the line like a built gasser...zero lag.

 

Wow!!! Lots of great info here and I will check out the cumminsforum.com as well.
I'm really just trying to keep this truck on the road for as long as possible. I plan on doing a under coat this weekend as well as pulling off all the little lighting kits the former owner put on. It is a great truck to keep. I noticed on ebay I can buy cases of oil filters.

Chris, I got the email. Thank you. A few items missing from the truck when I received it. I think I will put them back on. ie Fog lights etc.

My son has a F350 1997 and it's never on the road for more than a week without it breaking down. Big 7" stacks a programer etc. seem to make it unreliable. Being that it's an older truck with 250 plus K miles on it I can understand but he drives it like a race car. He's not getting behind the wheel of my truck anytime soon! Hahah

Thanks again guys. Printing these pages for reference.

 

I would put on an aftermarket fuel system. Standard fuel filters only filter down to 10 microns, and have minimal fuel/water separating capabilities. This is the primary cause of injector failure and melted pistons in the 2003 and newer Dodge Cummins. I run an AirDog system myself, filters down to 2 microns and every other fill up I can always drain something other than diesel out of the water separator. P.S. as far as your son's F350 goes, it's the engine under the hood. I'm pushing about 585hp and 1200 lb/ft out of mine, 220K and still going strong.

 

lol There is a reason we came up with FORD standing for Fix Or Repair Daily!

cummins is an extremely overbuilt motor... as long as you stay in the 500hp range or under, they make reliable daily drivers.

I'm about to hit 228k on my truck and shes sittin well over 500hp @ the rears. have no issues with her anymore. already weeded out most all of the weak links in the truck. couple more to go, but they have nothing to do with power upgrades...more of just junk dodge designs (steering related)

the reason dodge has such a great diesel engine that is extremely overbuilt is because dodge didn't make the engine! Cummins did, and cummins is a company that specializes in diesel engines for everything from large cargo ships, to heavy machinery, locomotives to small economy engines. The engine in our trucks was made for excavators, RV's ford F650's, fire trucks, etc. they took the same engine and put smaller injectors in it and a lower rated injection pump so it wouldn't destroy the dodge transmissions and rear ends they were putting behind them...these motors were originally designed to have more power than they come with in these trucks which is why it is so easy to get more power out of them..the powerstroke diesel on the other hand was NOT designed with more power in mind, nor was it designed for heavy commercial use like the cummins.

another quality note on cummins...cummins does customer engine buy backs to test their quality, and they will find a customer with a high mileage engine and put it through the same tests the engines have to pass when they are brand new, just to see how the engines are doing...the engines with 300k miles on them perform to spec and pass every test the brand new engines have to meet. that definitely says something about how these engines are built if they can pass engine stress tests with 300k miles on them just as well as a brand new engine can.