13 ways you are KILLING your DIESEL truck

what's up guys welcome back to the channel today i'm going to be talking about 13 things that you're doing that are destroying your diesel trucks now a lot of these things people overlook so this is a great video if you want to try to save money long term watch this video and try to apply this to your own life and your own vehicle and it should help you out i want everyone to see this video just because i truly believe it can save people money long term if you keep on top of your truck and your maintenance and all that stuff you will save money so please all i ask is you guys give this video a like just because then it's going to put youtube's going to push it to more people and then in turn more people will see it and be able to save money on their vehicle let's just get right into it uh the first thing i'm going to talk about is keeping your truck clean as you see my truck is behind me right here and you see in my videos it's usually always clean and especially here in saskatchewan canada we get a lot of road salt in the winters so if you let you know mud and salt and that kind of crap sit on your vehicle it's going to rust a lot faster than if you keep it clean so i know sometimes it's pain in the ass in the springtime when it's always dirty but just try to keep your truck clean and you know it will just be in overall good condition for a longer period of time all right the second thing i want to talk about is your fuel filter now i know a lot of people neglect changing their fuel filter but it is probably one of the most important things you can do to keep the cost down on owning a diesel truck yeah fuel filters are expensive but it's much more expensive to have to replace injectors or injection pump so make sure you keep up with your oil or with your fuel filters i suggest changing them every oil change about every ten thousand kilometers i know sometimes that's a little bit much you can maybe get away with every twenty thousand kilometers but also if you have a new truck that tells you kind of what your fuel filtered life is go by that but just do not go any longer than what it says because sometimes those computers you know will prolong your fuel filter life more than they should but basically just keep up with your fuel filter changes all right the third thing i want to talk about is your air filter this also gets neglected quite often i see it all the time where trucks come in and their air filter is just completely caked up they're complaining about smoke they're complaining about poor fuel economy check your air filter also if your truck's not getting if your engine's not getting enough air a lot of times your turbo will over speed just to try to spin faster to suck more air or push that air into the engine to give it what it wants so air filters are a very cheap way of keeping your engine running good because they don't cost much so make sure you're either changing like replacing your air filter or if you have an aftermarket intake and you've got a cleanable air filter make sure you're checking it and cleaning it regularly because it's extremely important fourth thing i want to talk about is regular oil changes a lot of guys will go along without oil changes but you need to do them i suggest every ten thousand kilometers no more than that and i suggest running synthetic oil um you guys probably already know this one so i'm not going to go on on it much but just oil changes are extremely important fifth thing i want to talk about is checking your oil levels checking your coolant levels and checking even you know the tire pressure in your air what the hell is even that along with that i'll say grease your front end of your truck and your u-joints all that kind of stuff just your regular preventative maintenance um you want to make sure that you're greasing your front end because then you're not going to wear out ball joints you want to make sure you got enough air in your tires just because they'll last longer with the proper psi in them also tires fail if they have really low or really high psi they can wear out a lot faster and they can ultimately just i've seen them come right off a wheel before because they were under inflated underinflation is the number one issue for tire problems just so you guys know it's not over inflation it's under inflation but yeah check your diffs you got to make sure that you have enough oil in your diffs or else you know you don't have to replace your front dip or your rear diff power steering fluid all that stuff make sure that i'd say at least once a month you're checking all the fluids on your truck and you're giving your front end and your u-joints good grease it will save you money in the long term trust me sixth thing i want to talk about is let your truck warm up especially in the winter and even in the summer uh if it's you know plus whatever outside it's the summer time you hop in your truck still let it run for 30 seconds before you drive it you want your bearings and your turbo to get nice and lubricated you want you know some heat to be in your cylinders all that stuff and in the winter time especially you know plug your truck in at night and let it warm up for a decent amount of time in the morning you don't want to drive your your truck when the engine is really cold that's just a good way to wear out stuff prematurely all right number seven goes with number six it's kind of the opposite so number six was let your engine warm up number seven is let your engine cool down now my friends are really bad for this and most people are bad for this but you know their truck will be totally up temperature they'll get to the destination throw her in park and just shut the keys off and get out and that's really hard on your exhaust manifold and your turbo stuff like that stuff like that is really hot because all that gas is coming out of your truck's engine and it's going to it heats up the metal and then when you just shut off your truck it's going to go from really hot to cold very quickly and that can crack your exhaust manifold it can damage your turbo so what you should be doing is you should be putting your truck in park and let it idle for about 30 seconds to a minute just so that the temperature can gradually come down and then you shut off the truck and then you won't have issues so letting your truck cool down before you shut off is also very important all right number eight bad dirty and old fuel you want to make sure you're getting your fuel from a good reputable fuel station some of these small town fuel stations they mean the best but if they don't go through a lot of diesel they could have old diesel in there or you know bad fuel filters on their diesel pumps stuff like that so you want to make sure you're getting your your diesel fuel from a reputable place also for you guys that work on the oil field and you probably take fuel from work i know i'm guilty of that as well if you're storing it in like 200 liter barrels shelf life on diesel fuel is only 6 to 12 months and that's best case scenario depending on storing conditions temperature stuff like that so you don't want to be putting in old fuel uh that that's not going to combust good in your engine it's just going to be hard on your injectors probably going to you know wear out some of your injectors not going to have nice spray patterns in your cylinders or on your pistons so i just would really encourage you to make sure that you're running you know good fuel additives you're putting nice clean fuel in your engine and you're putting fresh fuel in your engine not stuff that's been sitting around for a long time number nine i'm going to talk about low fuel levels so i know people that drive their truck until their fuel light comes on then they go fill it up now yeah you can do that but i really don't recommend it because you want your lift pump you want your injection pump and your injectors all that you want to have lots of fuel all the time you never want to starve it out with anything so i suggest and me personally with my truck quarter tank is my empty so when i hit a quarter tank of fuel that's when i go fill up you don't want to be running anything lower than that in my opinion just because you can have issues if your truck doesn't have a really good pickup system you can have issues where it sucks a little bit of air could aerate your fuel a little bit so most trucks should be okay but it's just one of those things it's just a good practice to have when you get a quarter tank of fuel just go fill up your truck don't be that lazy just go do it number 10 i have high egts now if you don't know egt stands for exhaust gas temperature that is the temperature of the exhaust coming right out of your cylinders and uh you know into your exhaust manifold and your turbo and stuff like that so you want to like a lot of guys will tune their truck they'll be running these big tunes they'll hook on to a skid steer they'll be towing a skid steer and they're just like yeah this is sweet i got tons of power but they're not actually they don't have any pyro to monitor their egts now i really recommend you get one because you want to check your egt's and especially on like a power stroke or a duramax that has aluminum heads you know you can melt your heads if you're running your engine too hot you know you can melt head gaskets you can blow head gaskets you can stretch head bolts all that stuff so egts are very important you don't want them to exceed you know i try to say don't exceed 1200 degrees fahrenheit for more than a couple seconds at a time depending on how well you've built your engine up if you have a stock engine i definitely don't suggest that you can look up what people say for your current your actual truck the one you own but uh yeah just egts are a very good thing to monitor you can usually get a little monitor with them with a pyro that goes in there you can get like a pillar like a circle pillar mount something like that just to check what your exhaust gas temperatures are because they're very important and your truck doesn't have a factory temperature gauge for them so they're a really good thing especially if you're running an upgraded truck with tuning you definitely want to keep an eye on your egts so you're not wrecking your your top end of your engine number 11 on my list is cheap parts now i know people that are like hey kyle can you price me up parts for my truck and i give them a price i give them a pretty good price and they're like oh i found it cheaper on rock auto or i found it cheaper on amazon it's like yeah okay some things is okay but if you're talking about like engine components you know camshaft sensors stuff like that i really recommend going oem or like a really really good aftermarket brand buying these really cheap stuff off of amazon and rock auto and stuff like that i know i've done it before myself for certain things but there are certain things that i won't buy off of online i want a really good trust trustworthy brand and i'm going to spend the extra money to know that i'm getting a good product and you know if you want your truck to last long you get what you put into it so you know if you're going to put in time effort and money into your truck it's going to last longer if you're going to cheap out with everything then you know don't come crying to me when your truck breaks down the 12th thing i want to talk about is when people ignore their trucks payload and towing capacities and it happens literally all the time you know people that have diesel trucks but they don't have they don't drive semis they think they drive a semi with their diesel truck and that's just always how it's going to be but news flash you're not driving a semi you're driving just a normal pickup truck so yeah diesels are great for towing but they do have limitations and you need to stay within those limitations maybe you can kind of push the boundaries a little bit here and there but constantly push boundaries which i know people that do then they complain about transmission issues then they complain about um blown head gaskets stuff like that so you should really make sure that you're towing within your truck's capabilities and if you want to increase capabilities well you can go about that in certain ways but it's going to cost you some money so just keep that in mind try to stay within your truck's normal towing and payload capacities and you'll know truck will last a lot longer last but not least i want to talk about number 13 and that is letting stuff pile up on your vehicle so you know you might have a little issue with your truck you're like i'll fix that later that issue is going to stem into something bigger and then you're like well now i don't have the money to fix it and then that turns into something even bigger and now you just have a truck sitting in your backyard that you can't do anything with so an example would be like a wheel seal um wheel seals are cheap and they're easy to change or you could get someone to do it for you they're relatively cheap for labor on them they don't take long uh if you don't do it you know and you start kind of slacking off on checking your diff oil you're going to lose all the oil in your diff and in your axle there and then you're going to have issues with your diff and so now your truck not only did it need a wheel seal now your truck needs a diff which is like 10 times as expensive so stuff like that just keep up with it electrical issues just stuff like that anything with your truck keep up with the issues as soon as something breaks fix it asap and uh stay on top of your maintenance stay on top of your repairs and your truck there's no reason why it shouldn't last you know 500 000 kilometers a million kilometers all that stuff if you take care of it it should last forever anyways guys that's it for the video i just wanted to go over things that i thought are commonly overlooked these are just my opinions so take it all with a grain of salt and you can do your own research but if you enjoyed it please like please subscribe it helps channel it so much follow me on instagram at dark iron diesel shoot me a message if you got any issues i try to reply to people but have patience with me because i get tons of messages every day um but yeah thank you guys for watching and i hope to see you on the next video

Channel: Dark Iron Diesel

Views: 118,194

Rating: 4.9326525 out of 5

Keywords: cummins, powerstroke, duramax, blown diesel, bad diesel, diesel truck, hurting your diesel, damaging your diesel

Id: x2QwZhDEhGQ

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021