1998 Dodge Ram feels like towing a trailer

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ajclockga

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Ram Year
1998
Engine
5.9
Ok 4x4, with 5.9 long tube headers. Starts up ,idles fine as long as in Park or neutral. Once you place it in drive it idles erratic from 500-1k up and down. And you can smell gas at redlights.Fuel comsumption is way up.When you press the gas it feels like it has a 10k trailer hooked to it. Very sluggish to gain speed. It goes thru all the gears,and thru all has that towing feeling. Takes a lot longer to get to 55 than normal. Once at highway speed 55 every once in a while it will shudder.Almost like a dead skip. The motor revs perfect.No skip. Had the tranny checked out by 2 different shops because I thought maybe it was there.But both shops say tranny is fine.On down hill it will coast fine,even picks up speeds,all wheels travel freely when off ground. The only code is for an exhaust leak right near the o2 sensor already knew about.
 

dapepper9

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Location
Iowa/Nebraska Border
Ram Year
2001
Engine
5.9L V8
Is the leak before or after the 02? If it's detecting excess air in the system it will run pig rich to attempt to make up for it.
 
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ajclockga

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1998
Engine
5.9
It is before I am pretty sure. The PO had the headers welded at flanges and they did a **** poor job. Just got the truck at a good price.Has had alot of work done to it. My transmission guy took a look at it yesterday,and is pretty sure its been rebuilt. The engine has a small cam,performance chip,headers rebuilt about 40k ago. Pretty sure its alot of minor problems combined. I know the idle air control is bad, and it is burning rich,can smell gas at red lights. I been leaving at 7am getting home at dark so gonna start tackling one prob at a time this weekend.
 

dapepper9

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2001
Engine
5.9L V8
Performance chip? If it's not a handheld programmer, get rid of it.

Leak before the 02 will definitely cause rich condition. If you can wrap some of that aluminum exhaust tape stuff around it to plug it you can test drive it and see if there is an improvement. Chances are it'll need welded
 

Dodge guy

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Ram Year
2001
Engine
360
Cadillac converter

Might want to check your cat out it maybe starting to get plugged restricted exhaust will do that I had a similar problem with my truck
 

dapepper9

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Might want to check your cat out it maybe starting to get plugged restricted exhaust will do that I had a similar problem with my truck

Clogged cat will do the opposite and cause a lean condition from lack of oxygen in the exhaust
 

Max78

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AZ
Ram Year
1998
Engine
Magnum 5.9
If you have a crack in the exhaust before the O2 sensor what generally happens is the exhaust will suck in fresh air and give the O2 sensor a false lean reading, It then proceeds to inject more and more fuel to compensate. Running it that way for any period of time usually results in a melted and plugged cat.

I just got done replacing an exhaust manifold on my friends XJ, the crack really wasn't that big but it was injecting so much more fuel that it wouldn't idle and had strange hiccups while driving. We replaced the exhaust manifold, O2 sensors, and the destroyed cat which fixed all of the running issues.
 

Yeret

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Ram Year
1999
Engine
5.9 Magnum
Performance chip? If it's not a handheld programmer, get rid of it.

This. Pretty much all of those are snake oil that do nothing at best and screw with the running condition at worst.

When I got my now-gone Prelude years ago, the first thing I noticed when I popped the hood was one of those big G-Power or G-Force or whatever the hell they were called "chips" sitting in the engine bay. Looking at the setup, apparently it was meant to interfere with the coolant temperature sensor circuit and trick the computer into thinking that the engine was always running cold so it would run rich because obviously an engine isn't making maximum power until it's running 8:1 air/fuel mixture. :emotions34:
 
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