This is what RAM engine failure looks like
About a week after he had performed an oil change, Anthony noticed that his 2017 RAM 6.7L started to exhibit a knock. “It wasn’t a real loud sound,” he recalled. “It sounded just a little different than normal. About a month later that sound turned catastrophic when the truck just stopped in the middle of the road. I had to have it towed to a shop. In the shop, they found that the #6 cylinder was a mess. The head was pulverized and the valves weren’t just damaged, they were missing! The engine needed to be rebuilt or replaced. To make things worse, they wanted $24,000 to repair it. That was a lot more than I wanted to spend.”
Here’s the thing… the mechanic couldn’t figure out how it happened. “He got into it and just didn’t know what went wrong,” Anthony recalls vividly. “All we knew at the time was that the trouble started in the 6th cylinder, and just tore things up from there. It was weird. I didn’t have any warning lights on the dash or even a P2609 or P0542 grid heater performance trouble code.”
Turned off by the stiff price tag, Anthony sought an alternative. “I have a friend who is an independent diesel mechanic, so we towed the truck to his shop and worked on it nights and weekends. It wasn’t long after we completed the engine that I saw the Banks videos regarding the Monster-Ram and the broken bolt problem. It sparked a memory from when I cleaned up the intake during the rebuild. I replaced the heater grid, but I remember the nut and bolt on the bottom of the heater not being there, just like in the video. It was right then that I decided to replace the stock parts with the Monster-Ram to protect all of our hard work.”
Included with every Monster-Ram kit is a billet aluminum high-flow intake plate and coil heater. Below, you’ll see a new factory grid heater compared to one that has failed (we removed the soot for better viewing).
And, if you’re thinking that cold weather and continuous use of the grid heater was the cause of the failure, you’d be wrong. “It’s 118° here today in Bunkerville, Nevada,” Anthony says with a laugh. “Make no mistake about it, there’s no excuse for what happened to my truck. It’s just a faulty design. With the Monster-Ram, I’ve protected my investment and added performance. It’s a win-win.”