2015 Ram 1500 camshaft replacement 5.7L

[PoconoJoe]

2015 Ram 1500 express 4x4 crew cab short box.

Can the camshaft be replaced without removing the engine?

The shop told my daughter they would have to pull the engine. They claimed they pulled the engine and sent it out for a rebuild.
It's a friend's shop, but was it BS?

It had the lifter tick which wiped out the cam. It runs good now and her aftermarket warranty paid for it, so if anyone got ripped off it was the warranty company, not her.

Bottom line, can the cam be replaced without removing the engine as in the good ole' days?
If so, is it just easier to just pull the engine?

 

[Burla]

Depends, if metal is in control valve they need to replace engine or pull and clean it out. Most of the time it doesnt need to be pulled, but it would be a better job if they did and indeed cleaned the block out.

Look up the lubrication strategies, we end hemi tick in a lot of rams with an oil change, search threads in my sig.

 

[ctwalton15]

I literally just completed my cam swap Monday. I had a bad lifter which wiped out the cam lobe. Yes you can leave the engine in the truck to do it. I removed the belt driven items, water pump and timing cover on the engine side. I remove the radiator and shroud for it as well as the electric fan. I left the ac condenser in the truck. There is enough room to pull it out. When you get it almost pulled all the way out, you need to take the cam bolt off that bolts the phaser to the cam to give you enough room but yes. Plenty of room. There are 3 bolts holding in the ac compressor. 2 of them bolt to the timing cover. I was able to remove those 2 and leave the ac compressor in place and didn’t have to crack open the ac lines period. I did have the system recharged a month or 2 prior, I was doing a heater core and ac evaporator so just had it refilled and didn’t want to refill it again. Truck runs really good.

A side note is the MDS solenoids have a magnet on the bottom of them, they sit in the intake gallery. 3 of them were original, 1 I replaced 20k miles ago to try and fix my misfire. They had a decent amount of trash stuck to them. But then again little tiny shavings, probably normal engine wear. So I will say if there was any debris either those magnets will probably pick up a decent amount. I haven’t seen any metal flakes in the time since my misfire started to the time just a few days ago where I completed the swap and had to motor open.

My misfire started at 133k on cylinder 1. I have 156k currently. So 23k miles between the first misfire and swapping the cam this past Monday and so far still have not found any flakes. I wonder if over time it got grounded down slowly to create some trash but very very very small to where not even noticeable or caught by the mds solenoids or oil filter.

If you would like to read more about the “journey” I had replacing it myself. Look for the thread I created called cam shaft help and look on the last page. That is where I posted some pictures and explanations and the route I took.

 

[PoconoJoe]

@ctwalton15 , thanks for you great explanation. I will definitely be checking out your thread.

So, it's a possibility our "friend's" shop didn't pull the engine to do the cam swap.
I'm really mad at myself for not driving up there to see if the engine was indeed out of the truck.

They claimed they brought it to another place for rebuild and we have a 6 month 100,000 mile warranty. We have yet to see that warranty. They said they had to finalize all the paperwork. We do need to go back for something and maybe they will produce that warranty.

All in all, the truck runs great, so no complaints there. It did throw some codes at first which didn't come back, so I guess that's normal.

 

[ctwalton15]

@ctwalton15 , thanks for you great explanation. I will definitely be checking out your thread.

So, it's a possibility our "friend's" shop didn't pull the engine to do the cam swap.
I'm really mad at myself for not driving up there to see if the engine was indeed out of the truck.

They claimed they brought it to another place for rebuild and we have a 6 month 100,000 mile warranty. We have yet to see that warranty. They said they had to finalize all the paperwork. We do need to go back for something and maybe they will produce that warranty.

All in all, the truck runs great, so no complaints there. It did throw some codes at first which didn't come back, so I guess that's normal.

Glad to hear everything is great. I will say if your warranty took care of the charges for the cam failure. I would've personally been fine with the engine removed to do the cam swap and make sure the block is cleaned. I would've loved if that was my case but again you don't really know 100%, just because they say they did and what they actually did are 2 different things. From what i've heard and been told if it has been bad enough as in there was a bunch of trash that has gone through out the engine they recommend replacing the intake manifold since they have a lot of chambers and "impossible" to get everything out, in my case I just essentially pulled everything off the front of the motor and swap everything in my drive way. Not too bad of a job just time consuming but I've got it back together and runs great. I did have some codes come on such as a coolant performance light and for whatever reason on first start up it wouldn't recognize the outside temperature and would not read the coolant temperature. also had a service 4wd light on. I ran it anyways for probably 20 minutes to see if I could find any leaks and so far so good. Didn't get to drive it after I started it since I didn't bleed the brakes but the next day I started it and drove it and the codes weren't on that time. So I want to say they were on due to everything being unplugged and no power going through the system for almost a month. Its friday now and truck still runs great no issue. I did have a valve cover leaking on one of the exhaust manifolds pretty bad, Had to put a second new gasket on and seems like it fixed the issue, so far so good. Overall costs I put into it was about $3000. 2k for the camshaft kit from MMX. I spent probably another $500 in small parts such as spark plugs, coolant, serpentine belt, oil + filter, valve cover gaskets etc. Then another $500 to have the heads machined, cleaned, replace 1 valve, and install some exhaust manifold thread inserts. I plan to have this truck for the years to come.


The truck is a 09 dodge ram 1500 156k miles 5.7l 4x4. Spent its life in arizona and texas until 2019 when we bought it so there is no rust what so ever on the body. Frame is clean except for a tiny rust hole towards the end of the frame almost where the bed and cab meet. Other then that a really clean truck so I would like it to drive as long as I can hopefully for quite a while. No tranny issues what so ever except for a small leak either from the rear main seal or a real trans leak. Not 100% certain.

I will say pulling the engine might've made it somewhat easier to someone who is experienced with pulling engines which I am not. I'm more or less experienced with just general maintenance. Had to learn to fix these things on my own since 1. I can't afford to have someone else do the work for me and 2. I don't trust anyone to do work either on my vehicle.

 

[PoconoJoe]

@ctwalton15 , thinking about what you said about the coolant...
At first there was a code that came up which indicated the three way coolant valve was not functioning but when we cleared it, it never came back. That three way valve sits on the frame rail on the passenger side of the engine bay. It controls the coolant going to the heater core. It would have been an easy fix, but seems it was just one of the few codes that came up after the engine was rebuilt.

There was also a transmission speed sensor code that came up, but that also didn't come back either.

It seems that after such and invasive procedure of pulling the engine, the computer(s) need to relearn a few things. So, after driving it for a while, the phantom codes stopped popping up.
Still keeping our fingers crossed hoping no more codes pop up. So far so good.

When things seem back to normal, I'm going do the Start-X remote starter. That system is truly plug-and-play. It seems way easier than the remote starter I did years ago where I had to splice into several wires under the steering column of a Ford Ranger.