James Tiberous
Junior Member
New to the board, this is my first post. Thanks in advance for any feedback that you can provide to help my situation. Full disclosure... I am a Realtor (a member of the National Association of Realtors) and I am in no way am attempting portray or to pretend to be a mechanic. I am not "Mechanically Challenged" but would not call myself anything but an amateur wrench turner.
With that being said, in the words of the great American poet Brian Wilson.... "Help me Rhonda, help, help me Rhonda".
My boss's fathers 1999 Dodge 1500 with a 5.9L engine with only 222,085 miles has been having intermittent starting issues for a couple of years. You could drive someplace and when you went to start the truck again...it would just crank, no start. After 10 to 120 minutes it would start up like there was never anything wrong. It would go sometimes a month in between pulling this not so funny stunt. The other day it wouldn't start for me ...or the next day, or the next so I decided it was time to finally put this to rest.
After doing some research I learned that the probable cause is the sensor under the distributor rotor... so I replaced the cap, rotor and sensor to the tune of $75. It started right up but it had a miss in it... which was not there prior to the not starting issue. Never step I replaced all of the plug wires thinking that all the yanking and pulling on them I had done might have broken a wire inside one of the wires... nope, still had a heavy miss. When I get up to 50'ish MPH the truck starts "Shaking and Shuddering" (okay, you can't tell me that the scene from Airplane didn't just pop in your head) and "backing down".
I used a spark tester and went to all 8 cylinders and all had good spark... but it still has a miss. Could I have defective sensor in the distributor causing the timing not to advance?
Again... thanks in advance for any/all help helping me figure out what is wrong here.
With that being said, in the words of the great American poet Brian Wilson.... "Help me Rhonda, help, help me Rhonda".
My boss's fathers 1999 Dodge 1500 with a 5.9L engine with only 222,085 miles has been having intermittent starting issues for a couple of years. You could drive someplace and when you went to start the truck again...it would just crank, no start. After 10 to 120 minutes it would start up like there was never anything wrong. It would go sometimes a month in between pulling this not so funny stunt. The other day it wouldn't start for me ...or the next day, or the next so I decided it was time to finally put this to rest.
After doing some research I learned that the probable cause is the sensor under the distributor rotor... so I replaced the cap, rotor and sensor to the tune of $75. It started right up but it had a miss in it... which was not there prior to the not starting issue. Never step I replaced all of the plug wires thinking that all the yanking and pulling on them I had done might have broken a wire inside one of the wires... nope, still had a heavy miss. When I get up to 50'ish MPH the truck starts "Shaking and Shuddering" (okay, you can't tell me that the scene from Airplane didn't just pop in your head) and "backing down".
I used a spark tester and went to all 8 cylinders and all had good spark... but it still has a miss. Could I have defective sensor in the distributor causing the timing not to advance?
Again... thanks in advance for any/all help helping me figure out what is wrong here.
Last edited: