New (to me) Truck

After 18 years and 280,000 miles of faithful service I retired my F250.  I struggled with the decision for months and I'm still not sure that I made the right choice but I really need one vehicle in the fleet that's not a project and that I can jump into and go anywhere in the country at a moments notice.  The F250 still met the second criteria but for it to continue to do that it would no longer meet the first criteria .

Anyway, after much soul searching, budget adjusting and shopping I purchased this.

It's a 2015 RAM 3500 4x4 with the Cummins, the Lariat package, the premium stereo and a bunch of other toys that while not necessary, make spending time behind the wheel quite pleasant.

I'm going to try and keep this thread updated as I make modifications, add accessories and (hopefully infrequently) make repairs.

Love the new truck, those Laramies are not a bad place to sit. How many miles on the clock did you get it with?

Id be preparing to delete ASAP if your area doesnt have emissions testing. 

Professor_Brap said:

Id be preparing to delete ASAP if your area doesnt have emissions testing. 

What does that mean?

In reply to Floating Doc :

Remove all of the emissions crap EPA puts on there to shut the hippies up.  DPF, DEF, EGR, etc they all add complexity and heat to diesels.  Diesels don't like heat.  Take that crap off and you will see increased power, fuel economy and longevity.

Ram50Ron said:

Love the new truck, those Laramies are not a bad place to sit. How many miles on the clock did you get it with?

 

Thanks.  It had almost exactly 50k on it when I got it and I've put 2,500 miles on it so far.  Most of them with the 24' enclosed trailer behind it.  The trailer was just about empty but boy does the truck tow well.

My current plan is to leave the powertrain and engine controls stock while the warranty still covers the expensive bits.  I would like better mileage but the power is fine and I really like that it never blows any black smoke. 

I can't decide if I want it to be a bit louder or not. It's so quiet that it's boring right now but it's also nice to be able to listen to the fancy stereo at reasonable volumes.

I have started adding some accessories and I'm hoping to get a little time over the weekend to document them.

What's the current mpg?

You may turn into a "soot head" -if you start plugging in chips, yanking emissions...I wouldn't on that nice truck.

Before you go that route :Get a Swiss cheesed(due to rust) 1998ish Ram Cummins project for that. Of course then: you could re-route the exhaust through the bed with a 10" dia. stove pipe, rattle can bed liner over the entire truck or flat black,  rip off the rear bumper, get all kinds of ranting, vulgar stickers, double park at W-mart and quit bathing. Preferred attire  then would be a day glo green or orange work Tee with shorts (winter only) or 4X sweat pants. (said with envy: 1981 I was a construction worker driving either wheezer 4/6 cyls and no day glo, apparently the company could care less if we got hit on the side of the road)..least these beater style Cummins  can be fast.

One night at the test-tune in South Louisiana, humid August Wed night, , when I ran my firebird to a 13.62@105 mph and door-handles to door handles was a Dodge Ram with a chip and soot stack, barely pulled ahead of him at 1000 ft mark...

In reply to Professor_Brap :

The only problem with deleting is that you never know when your area is going to start emissions testing.  That would leave you with a very expensive “off road only” truck.

im not trying to take this thread political but you may have noticed that with every successive election the pendulum has swung farther in the opposite direction.  I fear that the backlash will be so great next time that we may end up with federally mandated testing of all IC engines.

And please don’t think “that can’t happen here”.  Rest assured.  It can.

edit: if you decide to roll coal, please do put stack on it.  Keeps it out of my face.

Agent98 said:

What's the current mpg?

You may turn into a "soot head" -if you start plugging in chips, yanking emissions...I wouldn't on that nice truck.

Before you go that route :Get a Swiss cheesed(due to rust) 1998ish Ram Cummins project for that. Of course then: you could re-route the exhaust through the bed with a 10" dia. stove pipe, rattle can bed liner over the entire truck or flat black,  rip off the rear bumper, get all kinds of ranting, vulgar stickers, double park at W-mart and quit bathing. Preferred attire  then would be a day glo green or orange work Tee with shorts (winter only) or 4X sweat pants. (said with envy: 1981 I was a construction worker driving either wheezer 4/6 cyls and no day glo, apparently the company could care less if we got hit on the side of the road)..least these beater style Cummins  can be fast.

One night at the test-tune in South Louisiana, humid August Wed night, , when I ran my firebird to a 13.62@105 mph and door-handles to door handles was a Dodge Ram with a chip and soot stack, barely pulled ahead of him at 1000 ft mark...

I got 9.9 MPG pulling a mostly empty 24' enclosed trailer to Austin and back.  That's running 80 mph most of the way.  I'm getting around 17 with a mix of city and country driving some with and some without the trailer.  Overall it seems worse than the Ford but not horrible for what it is.

I like power but I don't like black smoke.  I never chipped the Ford but I did quite a bit of work on the 5.9L Cummins in the '93 Dodge I had before that and I was very careful to keep the smoke to a minimum.

I've added a few accessories.

The first one was a the under bed hardware for a goosneck hitch. 

As the name implies  the hardware goes under the bed. So, the bed needed to be unbolted and lifted a bit.

Once the hardware was in place three rather large holes needed to be cut into the bed.

This would have gone much faster if the hole saws I had were any good and if the jig saw hadn't died when I switched to that.  In the end I made due with a combination of step drills and die grinders.  Not fun but effective.  After painting the raw edges I lowered the bed back in place and installed the bezels and plugs leaving me with a bed that looked an awful lot like what I had started with.  Now however, I can pull the plugs and insert the ball and safety chain hookup points into their respective mounts and pull a goosneck trailer.

I also added the socket for the trailer wiring.  That was a pretty quick project.  I have a good hole saw of the appropriate size and the harness just plugs in.

The next accessory is a wireless phone charger.  I had a rental car with one in it earlier this year and thought is was really slick.  Installation required pulling the trim off the center console, drilling a couple of holes, tapping into the power port for power and reassembling.

Here's the charger waiting for a phone.

And here it is doing its thing.

I also made my first repair.  The truck developed an annoying rattle on passenger side.  A quick investigation revealed that the passenger side step was loose.  "No problem," I thought, "I'll just tighten it up."  Well, it turns out that the bolts that hold the step to the brackets go into rivnuts, all eight of which were loose.  Not only would they not tighten they also wouldn't loosen.

I unbolted the brackets from the truck, removing the whole step and the pried the brackets off the bottom of the step and hammered the rivnuts back through the brackets.

Here's what the rivnuts looked like after the bracket was pulled out.

Since there's no access to the inside of the tube I had to get a little creative with my repair.

I started by welding up eight nut/washer assemblies.

Then I enlarged all of the holes in the bottom of the tube.

Dropped the nut/washer assemblies into the holes, nut side down,

and welded the washers to the tube.

I have a whole litany of excuses for the crappy welds but the biggest problem is that I was TIG welding washers with unknown plating to a chrome plated tube of unknown alloy with little surface prep.  That combined with my marginal welding skills set me up for ugly from the get go.  I'm OK with that because apart from folks bored enough to read this thread nobody is ever going to see them because the brackets cover them.

Even if they didn't once the step is on the truck you'd have to lay on the ground to see them.

The truck is rattle free once again.

The chrome on the steps is looking pretty shabby.  I'm going to see if it polishes up.  If it does then I'll pull the brackets off both sides and either paint or powder coat them.  If not then I'll replace the steps.

Just an FYI, removing or modifying emissions equipment is a federal crime. Also, modern diesels are much more polluting out of the combustion chamber than older diesels. Deleting a modern diesel is actually worse for the planet (that we all share) than driving a pre-emissions diesel. 

Now, I'll step down from my soapbox and return you to your regularly scheduled build thread.

APE, that's a nice truck! Should pull about anything for a long time.

I've put a little over 6,000 miles on the truck since I got it and it's growing on me. 

There's a lot that I like about it.  It's quiet, powerful and comfortable and it tows really well. .  I enjoy all the toys.  Heated and cooled seats are nice as is the heated steering wheel.  In tow/haul mode the transmission calibration is pretty good (translation: Not annoying) and the engine brake is really nice.  The factory brake controller is also nice.

There's also things I don't like about it. 

The fuel mileage is pretty abysmal.  17 MPG is about as good as it ever gets and it's usually worse than that.  The fuel tank isn't large enough for a truck that gets such crummy mileage.  The loaded range is really only about 300 miles which is nerve-racking out here in the southwest where fuel stations can be many miles apart.

The engine/transmission calibration is sometimes annoying.  The response to the throttle input is inconsistent.  You never know when you try to accelerate rapidly how long it's going to be between the pedal press and some kind of a response.  If you move the pedal slowly enough it's repeatable and I've trained myself to keep transitions below the threshold but I hate having to adapt to something like that.

I really dislike the mirrors.  They're OK when they're flipped up, which is where I run them with an enclosed trailer but with them down the wide angle portion is going the wrong way (vertically) so you get great views of the sky and the road but not of the lanes next to you.  I'm tempted to leave them up but they really stick out too far in that position for city or off road driving.

I haven't had to fix anything although the one touch up on  both front windows intermittently doesn't work and the auto unlock on the drivers door is over zealous so it wants to unlock while you're pushing the lock button.  When I upgrade my scanner software so that I can read live BCM data on this truck I'll look into those issues.

My Ford had the built in tailgate step (courtesy of the later model box and tailgate I installed to replace the rusted out original) and I really missed it with the new truck so I installed an AMP Research BedStep Bumper Step

Other than that I've just been using it for truck stuff which is when it's at its best.