Mopar1973Man

Dude I love it that is a full size 3rd Gen fan basically to fit a 2nd gen.

Sorry I've been hung up working on many other things. @Mace what clutch did you get?

What I've Been Up To: Landslides, Servers, and a Talking Computer Named RaymondOct 21, 2026 · @Titanium If you've noticed I've been a little quiet around here, this post is why. The landslide took my shop and every tool in it, and my cancer means I'm not allowed to lift more than 40 pounds. So I've been putting my energy into what I can still do, which is sharing what I know and building things with computers. The HillsideOn May 29th, 2025, the hillside behind the house let go and buried the diesel shop. Everything in it was destroyed, tools included. Since then, Tweety Bird and I have been cleaning up, and this past June I bought a Kubota M62 tractor to do the heavy moving my back can't. We're still sifting the slide dirt for debris, saving the bigger concrete for a foundation, and planning a 40-foot connex box as a mini shop for fuel, firewood, and tools. I'll post more as it takes shape. What I Still Have: The KnowledgeI can't turn wrenches right now, but I haven't lost what I know, and that was always the most valuable thing in the shop. I started running a BBS in 1984 at age 14. I graduated from ITT Tech in 1989 and ran Cloud 10 Computers, a custom PC building business, from 1994 to 2008. In 2004 I hand-coded my first website in plain HTML4. On October 4, 2007, I started Mopar1973Man.Com as personal notes for fixing Dodge Ram Cummins diesels, so I wouldn't have to figure out the same repair twice. Those notes grew into the site you're reading now. Over the years, people have found it from all over. I've had calls and messages from Poland, Australia, and Germany, among other places, and many of them keep coming back to the site. That tells me the knowledge here is worth something, even with the shop gone. So I'm building a way to keep putting it to work: More articles. I want to write up the stories behind what I've done, including Cummins repair notes, the computers and networking side, and the landslide itself, and explain how I did each one so you can follow along. One-on-one help. If you're stuck on a Cummins problem, I want you to be able to talk to someone who has been through it. Paid consulting calls. I'm setting this up through the site's own subscriptions and gift cards, so booking time with me is simple. It's a way for me to keep helping people with these engines without a shop and without lifting a thing. Video. I'd like to add video to the mix, so you can see the problem explained and not just read about it. Vehicle Maintenance add-on. I'm also building a custom add-on for the forum where each member can keep their own garage and log service records: date, mileage, service type, cost, parts, and reminders for the next service. Taking Care of the Live SiteI've spent a good chunk of October on the server that runs the site. Here's the short version: I upgraded the forum software to Invision Community 5.0.20. The site now runs PHP 8.3, up from 8.2. I added stronger browser security headers and tightened up how the server handles logins. I tracked down and fixed a mail problem that was quietly blocking outgoing email. It was a one-line relay rule that had been missing, and it took a while to find. None of this changes how the site looks, but it keeps things running safely, which matters more now that I'm adding paid services. The Home Network RebuildThe rest of my energy has gone into rebuilding the home network from the ground up. Storage. The home server has four 4TB NVMe drives, which I pooled into one ZFS array with redundancy so a drive failure doesn't take anything with it. Each user gets their own managed slice of space. I did lose some old camera footage along the way when a partition got deleted before I'd migrated it. That one was a lesson, and the cameras are recording fresh footage now. Backups. Every night at 2AM the server wakes the workstations, backs up their data, installs updates, and puts them back to sleep. It never touches a machine while someone is logged in. Weather station. My AcuRite Atlas feeds a custom WeeWX setup I built that reads the data straight from the cloud, while the weather service keeps getting its own copy as before. I recently wiped the database clean to start fresh, so the history begins from mid-October. Power. An EG4 6000XP inverter now handles the house after my old Trace inverter blew. It runs off the 48V Trojan battery bank. Game server. It's not all work. The home server also runs my own Rust game server, just for fun. Tweety Bird and I both play on Ubuntu Linux through Steam, so it's something we can do together from our own desktops. I moved it onto the ZFS pool with everything else, so it has plenty of room and gets the same protection as the rest of the server. Everything at a Glance: My Conky DashboardWith this many moving parts, I needed a way to see the whole picture without logging into five different things. So I built a set of Conky panels that sit right on my desktop and start automatically every time I log in. They show me: The live website server. This is the server running mopar1973man.com, so I can tell right away if the site is healthy. The home server. CPU, memory, storage, and the rest of what's running behind the scenes at home. The EG4 inverter. Battery and power status pulled from the inverter's cloud portal, so I always know how the house is holding up. The weather station. Live readings from the Atlas, straight from the WeeWX setup on the home server. My own desktop. A main hardware and network panel for the machine I'm sitting at. The panels are tucked into the corners of my screen with the longer ones wrapped into two columns, so they stay out of the way but are always there when I look up. Two servers, the power system, and the weather, all in one glance. I'm planning to copy the same setup to Tweety Bird's computer too. Meet RaymondThe project I've had the most fun with is Raymond, my local AI assistant. Both workstations have an NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB of video memory, so I'm running AI models right here at home with Ollama instead of sending everything to the cloud. The server acts as traffic cop. It wakes up whichever workstation is available and sends the request there. I talk to Raymond through a web interface, and he talks back with a voice. He can run commands and work in his own sandboxed folder. He can also connect to the workstations through a limited account, which is enough to check the nightly maintenance logs for me. I'm still testing models to see how far a local setup can go on the kind of work I do. Thanks for Sticking AroundThanks to everyone who has called, checked in, or just kept coming back to the site while I've been busy. The shop will come back, and in the meantime the knowledge is still here. I'll keep posting updates as the new features go live. Until next time, Mopar1973Man

I know that the bad luck was there. After a long hard cold look at the tractor and started working it like a Cummins the problems sort its self out. Just makes it difficult when there is no Shop Manual for specs and information. I've got it running much better now and the project is still moving dirt.

ATF <-> Coolant cooler you can ditch if you have enough to keep your transmission temperature under control. ECM and PCM will need to be flashed to match what you are putting together.

Diesel Auto Power has the black fuel hose 1/2.

PCM that has the proper software for automatic Cummins. Basically you need the entire under hood wiring harness. This should have the transmission connectors. Make sure the ECM is ready for that PCM so it might be worth sending the two off to Auto Computer Specialist and let them flash them both. I've done one auto to manual swap which was easy. Personal Note. Sorry for being MIA I've been working hard here in the yard trying to get everything clean up after the landslide.

Winter's Coming — Time to Move Back InsideHey everyone, If you've been anywhere near my neck of the woods lately, you know the good warm weather isn't going to last much longer. Fall is creeping in fast, and it won't be long before the days turn cold and rainy for good. That means my outside work is on borrowed time. I've been putting in as many hours outdoors as I can while the weather holds, but once the rain and cold move in for the season, I'll be shutting that down and heading back inside. Before that happens though, I've still got a solid list of outdoor jobs to knock out while the weather allows it: Beast needs the driver side front wheel joint replaced Thor needs the passenger side wheel joint replaced before winter hits Get the snow plow installed on Thor Track down and fix the electrical gremlin in the plow controls Get the backhoe back up and running — it's currently down with a spool valve issue in the controls causing trouble with the left to right swing All of that has to happen outside, so it's taking priority while I've still got decent weather to work in. The upside for you all: once I'm off the outdoor projects, my attention is going right back into the site. I've got some updates and improvements I've been wanting to get to, and winter is exactly the stretch of time I need to knock them out. So while the outside work winds down, expect to see more happening here on Mopar1973Man.Com. As always, thanks for sticking around and being part of the community. More to come soon. — Mopar1973Man

Might double check the fuel relay in the PDC contacts can get flaky and make weak power.

Landslide Cleanup — Progress SummaryThe Slide (May 29, 2025, 8:15 AM)The first photo captures the immediate aftermath of the landslide that came down off the hillside behind the property. A section of the slope let go, taking several large pine and fir trees down with it — they're shown lying flattened across the debris field, still rooted at the base but toppled toward the yard. The slide plowed straight through the diesel shop, leaving it sheared apart and tipped at a steep angle, its wood siding torn open and insulation hanging out. In front of it, an old pickup truck sits crushed and half-buried under the debris pile. Scattered across the foreground is the material that had to be sorted afterward: broken cinderblock, sheets of pink foam insulation, coiled blue tubing, splintered lumber, a mattress, and general shop contents thrown clear by the slide. Bare dirt is exposed high on the hillside where the slope failed. The Site Today (September 8, 2026, 11:00 AM)The second photo, taken from an elevated spot on the property looking back over the same ground, shows how much has changed in the roughly fifteen months since. The debris field and the wrecked shop are gone — that whole section has been cleared, graded, and turned back into usable yard and driveway. Where the wreckage once sat, there's now a mounded dirt berm running along the base of the hill (likely holding back the remaining slide material), with a low stone retaining wall marking the edge of the driveway in the foreground. The driveway itself has been re-cut and is drivable, with a car parked partway up it. Off to the right, the property has clearly moved on to normal use again: a solar panel array is set up on a post, vehicles and a small tractor implement are parked near a shop-type building, and stacks of sorted rock and cinderblock sit staged nearby rather than scattered as rubble — material kept back for reuse. A dog sits in the yard, and the grass and fruit tree in the foreground show the place is lived-in and maintained again. What the Photos Show Getting DoneBetween the two shots, the work visible is: clearing the collapsed shop and downed trees, hauling out the debris pile, separating reusable material (stone/concrete) from junk, regrading and re-establishing the driveway, and rebuilding the yard's infrastructure (solar setup, parking area) on top of the cleared ground. What was a fresh disaster scene in May 2025 reads, by September 2026, as an active, functioning yard again — with a visible stockpile of salvaged stone/block still on hand, presumably for the next phase of work. Ongoing WorkThe cleanup isn't finished. Dirt from the slide is still being worked through — pulling remaining garbage and debris out of it — and the cleaned dirt is being moved to the back yard to level out the ground back there. So the front area shown in the September photo is largely squared away, but the back yard is now the active project, being built up and leveled with what's salvaged out of the slide dirt. There's also no shop or dry covered space to work out of the weather, so as fall turns toward winter, this work has to keep pushing forward as long as outdoor conditions allow before the weather shuts it down.