My '88 Ram 50 extended cab 4x4 musings

[steve1814]

Well, I figured I would start to chronicle the work on my Ram 50 4x4 to keep track of all the things I am replacing, rebuilding, modifying, and cleaning.

I bought the ram 50 back last year sometime to use just as a pick-up , I bought it for $2,000 which was a bit high, but the body had no rust and the frame very little so I figured I was ahead of the game... at least here in the northeast where you can hear your car rust away.

The Top end

Things were OK for a while, but I noticed that the exhaust was starting to leak around the manifold and I discovered that one of the exhaust studs had snapped off and the exhaust was starting to blow out the gasket. I figured I would just pull the head off and have a machine shop extract the stud since it was broke off up inside the cylinder head. I did some reading about the MCA jet's/cracked heads and figured I would just get a non-hydraulic/no jet head from Clearwater.

Once I got the new head, I dissembled the intake manifold to have it media blasted and discovered that the threads on the thermostat outlet were stripped. The the PO rigged a "fix" by inserting a bolt through the bottom of the outlet and putting a nut on the housing. while it did work, I did notice that there was a persistent leak around the bolt and I was not happy with that. I then set out to procure a new intake housing. once located and delivered, I took the replacement intake and the valve cover over to the machine shop to have them cleaned and continued the disassembly of the original head. During the disassembly I also found that the fuel pump was blowing fuel out of the weep hole and that the plastic isolator was missing. The fuel pump was mounted directly to the head with a TON of permatex acting as a gasket - another PO "fix"... So Rockauto and I were becoming fast friends.

Once having all the parts needed to get the head ready for installation I went ahead and replaced all the sensors, gaskets and EGR stuff. What I could refurbish (nuts, bolts, brackets) I did, everything else was new.