Engine Diagnosis of a 2006 Dodge Ram 1500 V6 3.7
Engine Diagnosis of a 2006 Dodge Ram 1500 V6 3.7.mp3
Steve
Hey. I’m Steve.
Matt
And I’m Matt
Steve and Matt
And we’re not mechanics.
Steve
But what we are is driven to get this job done. This is not a how to video. This is really more of two to regular guys just basically getting it done and that’s it, that’s it. And we don’t know what we’re doing but we are going to do it anyway.
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Hi and welcome to the autopsy portion of this Dodge Ram 3.7-liter V6 out of a $1,500, it’s out. I had mentioned in the beginning of the video that Matt had gone outside early one morning in the wintertime start the car up and went back inside let it warm up started here a really, really, really loud racket. Came back outside and the engine shut itself off. We tried to manually turn the engine by the crank and it’ll go only so far before it jams up. So, obviously something is seriously, seriously wrong. So, let’s just start the valve covers and see if we’ve got any broken rocker arms or anything like that and we’ll just go from there.
All right. So, looking at the passenger side we’ve got all of our rocker arms in place and it doesn’t look like anything else is bust up here. So, let’s go check out the other side.
All right. So, let’s remove this valve cover. Holy shit, look at this. You got a busted rocker here boy.
Matt
What?
Steve
Yes.
Matt
No.
Steve
Yes, the spring is off, screwed up. Hey, hey, hey.
Matt
This probably shouldn’t come out like that, that’s probably a problem. It could be a reason my engine seized up.
Steve
Look what we found.
Matt
We found problems.
Steve
Look at what we found.
Matt
We knew there was something wrong with this thing. We couldn’t figure it out. Shoot, if that’s it man that’ll save me a couple thousand dollars I won’t have to buy another engine.
Steve
Let’s not jump to conclusions but it didn’t…..
Matt
I want to, it saves me money.
Steve
Oh no!!
Matt
What?
Steve
It’s probably catastrophic.
Matt
Oh shoot. Let me see, let me get a close up on that. What do we got here?
Steve
So, here’s the culprit. The spring is broken, valve is busted, I’m sure we’ll find that in a bunch of metal down in the cylinder. It will be interesting to see what the top of the piston looks like. That is not supposed to look like that.
Matt
No.
Steve
Even us non-mechanic guys
Matt
We can say that’s wrong.
Steve
That’s wrong
Matt
That’s wrong.
Steve
Oh no, look.
Matt
You’re just costing me more money with your oh no.
Steve
Shards of metal, there’s metal.
Matt
That’s beautiful.
Steve
So, it’s not like we could just throw the thing back together again and go.
Matt
Let’s try it. Next steps.
Steve
Get a new engine.
Matt
I was hoping for better than that.
Steve
Well I mean if you can take this to a machine shop….
Matt
I was hoping for some magic.
Steve
You could take this to a machine shop and have them clean it, deck it, hone it and all that kind of stuff and by the time you get it back 6 months from now you might as well just buy a new engine.
Matt
Okay. Sounds good.
Steve
But did you sign out?
Matt
Not yet.
Steve
But before you buy that new engine let’s tear the heads off of this thing and check out the cylinders.
Matt
Yeah. Let’s research and see if we can put a V8 in.
Steve
I’m pretty sure we can.
Matt
Say goodbye.
Steve
Goodbye.
All right. So, we’re continuing to disassemble this thing and under normal circumstances if we were going to try to put it back together we would have made a notation as to the which rockers were which and which lifters were which et cetera et cetera et cetera. But this thing is pretty much dead, there is metal down the bottom.
All right. So, let’s start taking some of the stuff off the front of the engine here so that we can remove the timing cover so that we can get access to all that timing stuff just out of pure curiosity because these things jump and we’re going to…. Well Matt’s going to buy a new one.
All right. So, our main objective is to pull this head and see what’s going on in the cylinders down below after we drop the valve. And I could pull, I could just take the chain off and do that but I’ve never worked with single overhead cams before so I actually want to take off this front cover and just kind of look at everything and see what it looks like because that car right there got a very similar setup with do cams on top and I’m actually going to have to take that one apart and put it back together again. So, this is kind of a practice round for me. So, I’m going to kind of go the long way around taking the head off.
Well here it is with the cover off. So, with the camshafts off I’ll be able to take those chains off and pull the heads. All right, all the head bolts are off and ready to come out. Well moment of truth.
I just pulled the head off and I have not even touched, I haven’t touched a thing. That is what we’re looking at. Try cleaning up that mess and see what we see. All right. With the piston down, you can see what the valve did to the side of the cylinder wall there. That’s a pretty deep gouge. So, cleanup one and you can see the dent in the piston.
