This weekend turned into truck maintenance hell. I pulled the accessory drive, timing cover, oil pan (full of oil, I’m gonna give myself props for that!) and replaced the windage tray, timing chain/tensioner/guide, oil pump, and water pump. The fan clutch nut was installed by a gorilla! I ended up pulling the whole assembly and benching it and welding a piece of tubing to the pulley to get a 24” wrench on it to break it free! Removing the crank pulley/balancer and reinstalling it was a bitch. The special Chrysler puller tool I got didn’t reach deep enough to grab the flats on the backside of the pulley so I ended up sitting between the radiator and the pulley and used a die grinder to open up the necessary areas on the pulley. Then the spacers with the tool weren’t deep enough so I had to run the tool against the head of the bolt instead of bottomed in the bore. A regular three jaw puller might have worked perfect. Then reinstalling it, the install tool wouldn’t fit inside the bore so I ended up impacting the pulley on with the bolt that fastens it which worked great.
I primed the oil pump by removing the lower pipe plug on the oil filter housing and threading a barbed fitting in, and used an oil suction gun and hose to supply oil trough that fitting which feeds directly to the pump and
I noticed quite a bit of corrosion pitting along the path of the seal of the water pump on the timing cover but everything else was immaculate.
After I finished at 6am on the third day my brand new water pump temp sensor would not read temp and my old one that broke during removal of the fan clutch did work. Then after a while the old one stopped working and then the new one worked again....
The biggest point of all of this was to replace the oil pump because I had symptoms of low oil pressure after running the truck hard Offroad, and the symptoms pointed towards a bad pressure regulator in the pump. I also wanted to change the timing change since I was in there. The old timing chain showed zero wear or stretch and the flimsy tensioner/guide were both in great shape for 180,000 miles! Upon startup the oil pressure went right back to where it always does as a low 36psi
I pulled the oil pressure sending unit and played with it with a pin inside and found that the sensor would reset based on where you pushed the pin and would then react around that baseline, so it went from pressure around 36psi to pressure around 72psi to pressure around 61psi, while showing 22psi with the engine off... so the sensor is toast though I would never expect to se signs like that because usually on a sensor of that type of it hangs up on a wear ridge it will always bottom at a certain number and will go up to the true value as it leaves the ridge.
Otherwise she runs great, cylinder wear is ok with a lot of the crosshatch missing but the cylinders are definitely not polished, and the camshaft shows very little wear.
Next weekend it’s axle shaft u-joints, axle and pinion seals, and transfer case rebuild