Hello again all,

After getting my '00 3500 Ram Wagon used in February, I have been trying to undo all of the @&$% that the previous owners did to it in 12 years of use. I'd LOVE to know what everybody uses the rear air vents for because they are almost always missing... Anyway, I do have a few questions. I'm still battling the idle #5 misfire and any help on that would be appreciated. However my main questions on here are about less significant things. For starters, is there supposed to be a light that comes on when the glove box is opened? It looks like there is a switch for it but I can't find anything. Is there supposed to be a light in the floor area of the drivers side where the pedals are? There are some taped off wires down in that area so that's part of the reason I was wondering. Also, when I open the hood, on the right side there is a black wire coming off of one of the battery terminals. It goes into a little brown plate on the firewall (which I would assume is the guage for the battery) but then another black wire comes out and it's just taped. There's also a bit of wire loom running down into the bowels of the engine bay so maybe that's where it's supposed to go although I'm not sure. Also, considering I really don't know anything about engines, what is the layout and what are the individual systems connected by the belt? I know which is the alternator, a/c, water pump, and harmonic balancer but I'm not sure about the other stuff. I also figured out what was wrong with my rear right speaker. If anyone cares or didn't already know, above the headliner right near the air conditioning connector pipe/tube there is a joint that connects the right rear wiring to the rest of the rear wiring. Mine came unplugged. I plugged it back in and the speaker works fine now.

Anyway, sorry for such a long and rambling post but I really need help with this stuff. Any suggestions, ideas or pictures of the afformentioned locations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Bill

 

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=...anual&_sacat=0

 

The number five misfire can be a few things. I would guess it could be a fuel injector. They are know on all engines in our vans to go bad after 100k.

 

Well that's the interesting part. I had a shop look at it and they said the misfire dissappears above idle speed. They also said they could shift the misfire to any cylinder by rotating the distributor. I replaced the distributor but the CEL is still on and it seems to idle kind of rough. I'm going to check what the code is as soon as I can but the new dist. obviously didn't solve the problem and if anything could have made it worse. Since the misfire we replaced plugs, wires, cap and rotor, (brass contacts not aluminum) had the intake gasket replaced, (shop said it needed doing) and I personally changed distributors and switched out injector 5 and injector 7 to see if the misfire would follow the injector. No such luck. I also tried to clean the IAC. The shop said that cylinder 5 had good compression so I wouldn't think it's a valve or a cracked head. I followed the TSB for plug routing and I used wire loom around the wires. I have also ran some SeaFoam through the tank a couple of times. It seemed to make the CEL come on when it had previously been off but perhaps that's just coincidence. Maybe a vacuum leak? Or could it be from a clogged Cat? I'm running out of ideas and I REALLY hope it's not the PCM... Like I said before above idle it apparently goes away. And I'm only going on 98K for the record.

Thanks,
Bill

 

It's a sticking valve in the #5 cylinder. The higher RPMs increases the flow past the head of the valve which helps force it closed. The flow past the valve at idle is insufficient to do the same thing. Since you haven't listed an O2 sensor code I would be inclined to think the intake valve is the one sticking.

 

Ok. How would I go about fixing this? And if it is the intake valve on #5 why would the misfire be transferable when moving the distributor?

 

To fix it you can first try running a motor flush to see if it's just some sludge, varnish, or other crud that is causing it to stick. If that doesn't solve it, then you will need to remove the head to be able to access the valve.

Moving the distributor isn't literally causing the #5 misfire to move, moving it is simply causing other misfires to appear since the distributor is out of alignment.

 

3 months later.

My plan of action for the misfire is to get the reman heads suggested by alloro on another thread. Hopefully that will solve it. The PCM was reflashed/reprogrammed but could the internals still be bad?



This is what I was referring to in my first post. Any idea what it is? There is a wire that runs all the way down the frame to the towing package and a couple of screw holes on the knee panel on the drivers side too so maybe its from a brake controller? The wire is cut and has split loom around it.

Slowly but surely I'm fixing all this crap.

Thanks,
Bill

 

It's a bit hard to tell from that picture you posted, but to me it looks like someone ran a 12 volt feed from the battery back to a pop-up trailer to run some night lighting.

 

.....