Gallowbraid
Adventurist
After relying on my trusty Tacoma for the past 4 years to carry me and mine on various adventures, and to make the regular Home Depot and Pike Nursery runs, it had become obvious we needed a full size vehicle again. The car market is a fickle thing, and in looking at the trend new vehicles were taking I decided it was time to take advantage of the peak used vehicle prices and I sold the Tacoma for $4000 less than I paid for it 4 years ago. The Toyota tax is nice on the back end.
I figured I'd rely on my motorcycle for transportation until spring when I estimated the used market would have settled down some, and settled in to casually browsing the internet for F150's, F250's, GMC Sierras, Tundras and Ram Rebels. I tried to carefully weigh all of the negatives of the Tacoma against the positives and generate a list of features I wanted in the next vehicle that might cause me to keep it for more than 4 years (which I believe is my longest vehicle ownership to date). I also put together a list of things I liked and didn't like about previous full size vehicles. I've had F150s aplenty, an F250, a Sequoia and I've rented a plethora of Rams, Expeditions, F150s, F250s, Yukons, Sierras, Sequoias, Escalades, Wagoneers, etc. I started to form a rough idea of what I'd like and what would keep my wife happy.
This vehicle would see my normal forest service and rutted two track adventures, but would also see a fair amount of towing as friends and I expand our two wheel adventures and drag motorcycles around the country. It also needed to be useful as an everyday truck, which the Tacoma wasn't. The Tacoma was great at camping and getting out into the wilderness, but without a trailer in tow it was pretty useless at Home Depot, plant nurseries and even the grocery store. If more than myself and 1 other person wanted to venture out the rear seat delete rendered the Tacoma ineligible as well. While I had modded the Tacoma to fit some very specific needs, the need for a "truck" always seemed to be higher than the need for an adventure vehicle. This next vehicle needed to strike and impossible balance between both needs.
It was at this point that I ended up in a rental Ram 1500 for several weeks for work. My wife and I made a few weekend runs in it for various things and I made several trips between Atlanta and New Orleans in it. This was a base model truck with the V6 engine. The wife liked it quite a bit and that always helps when looking at new vehicle purchases. I started to focus in a little more on the Rams due to their features and pricing and came across a used 2019 1500 locally. It was a 2 owner, local truck with a good service history. My wife and I ran over to the dealership one weekend just to take a look, and after a test drive decided we'd do a little wheeling and dealing. After it was all said and done I had traded a motorcycle and gotten the truck for quite a bit less than the going market price. We took the Ram home and that's where the troubles began.
I drove the truck locally for a couple of days and then made a trip out to New Orleans for work. On the way back the truck presented a warning message that the Auto Start/Stop system was disabled and to service the system. After stopping to get gas the error had gone away, but it was replaced by a check engine light. My scanner revealed the code to be misfires in cylinder 8. After returning home I took the truck back to the dealer. The service department took the truck in, and 3 days later informed me that the truck needed 16 new spark plugs to the tune of $900. I verified what they had done to diagnose the misfire, which was all pretty standard, move the coil pack from cylinder 8 to another cylinder to see if the misfire followed to coil (it didn't) and Ohm test the injector (it passed). Spark plugs would be the next thing to "test", but they were attempting to do this diagnosis by throwing parts at the problem at my expense. After getting the general manager involved they moved forward with swapping all of the plugs, cleaning the throttle body and performing an injector cleaning at no cost to me. A few days later I got the truck back and plugged in my scanning tool to monitor misfires. At this point it was still occasionally misfiring on cylinder 8, but not enough to throw a check engine light. Per a Jeep/Ram master tech friend of mine it wasn't enough to be concerned about; 3 to 6 misfires across 30 minutes to an hour of driving. Then, after about a week, it threw the Auto Start/Stop error and check engine light again. The scanner revealed over 600 misfires in a matter of just a few minutes.
At this point I had gone down the internet rabbit hole of reading about failed lifters, rollers and worn camshafts in the pushrod Hemi engine. I was fearing the worst, but to their credit the dealership was committed to making this right. I dropped the truck off again with very specific information: the misfires happen with greater frequency at idle or while the engine isn't under load and screenshots from my scanner showing engine and the status of various sensors when the CEL came on the second time. After another multi-day stay at the service department the truck was returned to me with new injectors and I haven't had a problem since. The cylinder 8 injector Ohm tested fine (both the dealer and I tested it), but apparently there was something happening at random intervals with the electronics inside the injector. It's the furthest back on the passenger side and tucked up under the firewall where a lot of heat accumulates. I'm assuming after roughly 80,000 miles that heat had started to cause some issues. Here's hoping I get plenty of life out of the new injector.
Enough intro, here he is, Il Vecchio the 2019 Ram 1500 Laramie:
Il Vecchio (Old Man in Italian) is, appropriately, my old man truck. Big and comfortable with creature comforts galore, he'll eat up the highway miles while towing, provides ample cargo space in the bed and cavernous passenger cabin, and came with some aftermarket additions thanks to the previous owner. The build sheet from the factory shows the 5.7 Hemi MDS VVT eTorque V8 is mated to an 8 speed automatic 8HP75 transmission with 4wd transfer case. The rear end is 3.92 gearing with limited slip.
The previous owner outfitted the truck with a Rough Country 2 inch leveling kit consisting of M1 Monotube struts in the front and Vertex 2.5 adjustable rear shocks with remote reservoirs. While Rough Country wouldn't have been my first or second, or third choice; I have to admit that the ride is fantastic in this truck. According to the odometer Il Vecchio did a fair amount of towing in his past life with roughly 30,000 of his 80,000 miles being spent attached to a trailer. It's very cool that the on board ECU keeps track of this. To support that weight the previous owner added an Air Lift air bag system to the rear and plumbed the lines to the rear bumper very cleanly; terminating the lines in a single schrader valve next to the license plate. Currently the front struts are set at 0" of lift so I'll need to pull them and convince @Scott B. to risk his life with a pair of sketchy auto store spring compressors to adjust them to the 2" of lift they can provide. Air Lift offers a cradle system similar to the Daystar cradles I had on the Tacoma so that the rear axle won't be limited in it's down travel due to the bags. I have those on order now.
I figured I'd rely on my motorcycle for transportation until spring when I estimated the used market would have settled down some, and settled in to casually browsing the internet for F150's, F250's, GMC Sierras, Tundras and Ram Rebels. I tried to carefully weigh all of the negatives of the Tacoma against the positives and generate a list of features I wanted in the next vehicle that might cause me to keep it for more than 4 years (which I believe is my longest vehicle ownership to date). I also put together a list of things I liked and didn't like about previous full size vehicles. I've had F150s aplenty, an F250, a Sequoia and I've rented a plethora of Rams, Expeditions, F150s, F250s, Yukons, Sierras, Sequoias, Escalades, Wagoneers, etc. I started to form a rough idea of what I'd like and what would keep my wife happy.
This vehicle would see my normal forest service and rutted two track adventures, but would also see a fair amount of towing as friends and I expand our two wheel adventures and drag motorcycles around the country. It also needed to be useful as an everyday truck, which the Tacoma wasn't. The Tacoma was great at camping and getting out into the wilderness, but without a trailer in tow it was pretty useless at Home Depot, plant nurseries and even the grocery store. If more than myself and 1 other person wanted to venture out the rear seat delete rendered the Tacoma ineligible as well. While I had modded the Tacoma to fit some very specific needs, the need for a "truck" always seemed to be higher than the need for an adventure vehicle. This next vehicle needed to strike and impossible balance between both needs.
It was at this point that I ended up in a rental Ram 1500 for several weeks for work. My wife and I made a few weekend runs in it for various things and I made several trips between Atlanta and New Orleans in it. This was a base model truck with the V6 engine. The wife liked it quite a bit and that always helps when looking at new vehicle purchases. I started to focus in a little more on the Rams due to their features and pricing and came across a used 2019 1500 locally. It was a 2 owner, local truck with a good service history. My wife and I ran over to the dealership one weekend just to take a look, and after a test drive decided we'd do a little wheeling and dealing. After it was all said and done I had traded a motorcycle and gotten the truck for quite a bit less than the going market price. We took the Ram home and that's where the troubles began.
I drove the truck locally for a couple of days and then made a trip out to New Orleans for work. On the way back the truck presented a warning message that the Auto Start/Stop system was disabled and to service the system. After stopping to get gas the error had gone away, but it was replaced by a check engine light. My scanner revealed the code to be misfires in cylinder 8. After returning home I took the truck back to the dealer. The service department took the truck in, and 3 days later informed me that the truck needed 16 new spark plugs to the tune of $900. I verified what they had done to diagnose the misfire, which was all pretty standard, move the coil pack from cylinder 8 to another cylinder to see if the misfire followed to coil (it didn't) and Ohm test the injector (it passed). Spark plugs would be the next thing to "test", but they were attempting to do this diagnosis by throwing parts at the problem at my expense. After getting the general manager involved they moved forward with swapping all of the plugs, cleaning the throttle body and performing an injector cleaning at no cost to me. A few days later I got the truck back and plugged in my scanning tool to monitor misfires. At this point it was still occasionally misfiring on cylinder 8, but not enough to throw a check engine light. Per a Jeep/Ram master tech friend of mine it wasn't enough to be concerned about; 3 to 6 misfires across 30 minutes to an hour of driving. Then, after about a week, it threw the Auto Start/Stop error and check engine light again. The scanner revealed over 600 misfires in a matter of just a few minutes.
At this point I had gone down the internet rabbit hole of reading about failed lifters, rollers and worn camshafts in the pushrod Hemi engine. I was fearing the worst, but to their credit the dealership was committed to making this right. I dropped the truck off again with very specific information: the misfires happen with greater frequency at idle or while the engine isn't under load and screenshots from my scanner showing engine and the status of various sensors when the CEL came on the second time. After another multi-day stay at the service department the truck was returned to me with new injectors and I haven't had a problem since. The cylinder 8 injector Ohm tested fine (both the dealer and I tested it), but apparently there was something happening at random intervals with the electronics inside the injector. It's the furthest back on the passenger side and tucked up under the firewall where a lot of heat accumulates. I'm assuming after roughly 80,000 miles that heat had started to cause some issues. Here's hoping I get plenty of life out of the new injector.
Enough intro, here he is, Il Vecchio the 2019 Ram 1500 Laramie:
Il Vecchio (Old Man in Italian) is, appropriately, my old man truck. Big and comfortable with creature comforts galore, he'll eat up the highway miles while towing, provides ample cargo space in the bed and cavernous passenger cabin, and came with some aftermarket additions thanks to the previous owner. The build sheet from the factory shows the 5.7 Hemi MDS VVT eTorque V8 is mated to an 8 speed automatic 8HP75 transmission with 4wd transfer case. The rear end is 3.92 gearing with limited slip.
The previous owner outfitted the truck with a Rough Country 2 inch leveling kit consisting of M1 Monotube struts in the front and Vertex 2.5 adjustable rear shocks with remote reservoirs. While Rough Country wouldn't have been my first or second, or third choice; I have to admit that the ride is fantastic in this truck. According to the odometer Il Vecchio did a fair amount of towing in his past life with roughly 30,000 of his 80,000 miles being spent attached to a trailer. It's very cool that the on board ECU keeps track of this. To support that weight the previous owner added an Air Lift air bag system to the rear and plumbed the lines to the rear bumper very cleanly; terminating the lines in a single schrader valve next to the license plate. Currently the front struts are set at 0" of lift so I'll need to pull them and convince @Scott B. to risk his life with a pair of sketchy auto store spring compressors to adjust them to the 2" of lift they can provide. Air Lift offers a cradle system similar to the Daystar cradles I had on the Tacoma so that the rear axle won't be limited in it's down travel due to the bags. I have those on order now.
