Idaho Guy

I took the truck I'm interested in by 2 local tranny shops this afternoon and both said that the truck was both clean and in very good mechanical shape, transmission-wise. The dealer I'm buying from is having the box and rocker panels painted over the weekend and I plan on closing the deal by mid next week.

Thanks again all for the valuable input I received throughout all of this.

bkrukow

I have the same truck with 285's on it. I pulled a 5000# camper 1700 mile round trip to Colorado and back and got 8-9 mpg all the way. The taller tires on that high of a gear realy mess with it. It would bog down prety bad in my opinion untill 2000 RPM. Then it would go great. The problem is the crapy dodge auto. It is hard for me to run it that hard down the inerstate and wind it up out of OD but in OD you have to run nearly 80 to get to 2000RPM. Out of OD its around 2700 at 72 ish. I dont like running it there all day but thats what you got to do if you want to get anywhere. All in all I like it though.

farmer dave

You will really like the truck. I wouldn't worry about the fuel system to much, just as long as yu have gauges to monitor. Good luck, and have fun!
dave

Idaho Guy

Thanks for the heads-up. This kinda spawns another question, though - how accurate are the fuel guages? In my ol' Chev, the first half of the tank seemed to last forever but once you were below half, it started to drop super-fast. It was something I got used to but it was still frustrating. Are the dodge fuel guages any better?

bkrukow

The guages in the dodges are natoriously bad. I have a 34 gallon tank and when my low fuel lite comes on I can only get between 20-24 gallons in. What realy frustrates me is that I dont know if I can use the last 10-14 gallons in the tank or not. I have never been brave enough to try and run it much past the light comming on. It would be nice to extend the range between fillups when on long road trips. With no load thats an extra 150 miles on every tank.

farmer dave

I think that he is talking about the overhead reading, one of them is DTE which is drive till empty. These are very inaccuracte.
dave

Idaho Guy

Actually, I was referring to the in-dash fuel guages. And it doesn't sound like they're going to be much better than they are in my old truck.

billg

I've heard of this happening after filling up where the big rigs fill. Those pumps pump a lot more fuel than our trucks can take without hurting something in the tank. This was discussed on this site a while back. You might be able to do a search on this and find the thread.
Hope this helps.