Southern MN and Central IA | The '99-'02 Dodge Ram diesels suffer from a poorly designed fuel delivery system. The problem is the fuel pump is located on the engine so it has to pull fuel from the rear of the truck to the front rather than the pump being near the tank and pushing fuel to the injector pump. The injector pump is lubricated by the fuel and as you found out if the fuel pump starts to go bad it will starve the injector pump from lubrication. If you're not pulling heavy loads its hard to notice this because even if the fuel pump is not delivering the proper psi to the injector pump the truck will still drive yet without over 12 psi in pressure you will not properly lubricate your injector pump. I'm pretty sure that the fuel pump was a packaged deal from Cummins when Dodge bought the engines and since it was already there they didn't see any reason to change it. The '99 must have started having problems in '02 and Dodge realized they needed to change this.
There is a site with a fuel system mod for the Cummins to prevent this problem:
http://xj.cdevco.net/auto/fuelsystem/ |
Replace Dodge injector pump
