Battle of black smoke finally over! A note of thanks.

[leety]

When I drove the 2001 Dodge (aka The Dragon) home for the first time shew blew billowing clouds of coal all the way from Kingman Arizona (the place of acquisition) to my home in Los Angeles. Hence the truck was named "The Dragon."

 

There was a long list of items causing that voluminous smoke including: dirty fuel filter, tired injectors, busted intercooler boots, worn out legacy tuner (or not), cracked exhaust manifold, etc. With each measure taken the amount of smoke output was greatly reduced. After a lot of learning and a lot of fun adventures I finally won the battle!

 

The last measure was changing the gearing in the final drive from 3.55 to 3.73 to compensate for my slightly oversized tires. As a bonus for that adjustment my speedometer is now accurate!

 

Many thanks to this forum for all the assistance through the process to make The Dragon run all clean and pretty.

[JAG1]

When these first gens are kept up proper there is no sweeter ride on the planet. Glad you got all together.

[Mopar1973Man]

I'm glad the Quadzilla tuner and tunes listed here was helpful for your case. I'm wondering how is the power difference now being re-geared to 3.73?

[leety]

3 hours ago, Mopar1973Man said:

I'm glad the Quadzilla tuner and tunes listed here was helpful for your case. I'm wondering how is the power difference now being re-geared to 3.73?

I don't know how to characterize it.  It just feels normal. No extreme change but it feels like it's not struggling to get up the mountain any more.

Now to start tracking my data so we can get the tuning set up correctly for my setup. Will be away for a couple of weeks so when I get back I will organize my camera and Android so I can easily record the realtime data as I drive. I'll get a new thread going for that.

 

3 hours ago, JAG1 said:

When these first gens are kept up proper there is no sweeter ride on the planet. Glad you got all together.

No doubt!  It's a 2nd gen though 2001. I wanted disk brakes.  I lost an RV to brake failure up here one time so that a thing up here. That was a bad day. Total loos of a 1978 GMC Royal. It was a cool one too, complete custom build. The front wheel drive, Tornado motor, GMC RV was nifty. GMC made 14,000 units made about 11,000 are still in service. Minus mine :-(

[JAG1]

I like it when some get in my truck and say, wow this thing is smooth or it's a honey of a truck. I changed the vibration damper with a Cummins damper, when they still had them, and that made a huge difference since I could see a wobble on the old one at idle. The old one got damage to the rubber from the PO never cleaning the puke bottle.