TOP 5 UPGRADES FOR 5.9 CUMMINS

what's up guys welcome back to the channel just wanted to do a video on my kind of top five uh upgrades i like to do on a five nine cummins this is a common rail uh there's also gonna be kind of a sixth one that i'd say is more optional you're probably gonna end up having to do it eventually so stay tuned to the end for that but yeah i'm just out here with bronx we're kind of exploring this is a place i actually used to hang out back when i was a kid but if you can see it's just littered with trash now it's just disgusting how people can just dump their garbage here it's uh frustrates me but anyways we're gonna get into this video here if you find it useful please like and subscribe um and yeah check out the instagram with dark iron diesel so i'm gonna do these in the order that i would do them personally if i got a plain jane bone stock five nine common rail these are exactly the order i would do them in uh we're just gonna start things off obviously we're gonna get an exhaust on it mine has a five inch uh flow pro exhaust a four inch would be fine too but basically you want to let your truck breathe kind of the factory muffler can be a bit restricting so if you get an aftermarket kit and if you even if you get it with a muffler you don't have to get a straight pipe but if you get a muffler it's more of a resonator so like you could still look hold it up and kind of see right through it there's no uh noticed airflow restrictions in them so that that's the first thing i would do plus i mean you're driving one of these trucks you want to hear it and they sound so good uh especially if they're straight piped i know some places they don't like you to have straight pipes but even with them with a resonator they just they sound awesome so the first thing i do pretty much to any vehicle regardless of what it is even if it's a dirt bike is i upgrade the exhaust what do you think of that one pretty good next one's going to be under the hood now keep in mind this is just kind of my opinions uh i mean everyone's going to have different upgrades what they think is best but this is just if anyone values my opinion this is it also comment your favorite upgrade you like to do to your truck whether it be one of these ones or maybe it's one that i'm totally forgetting so make sure you let me know look at this this is what the nice saskatchewan roads do with all the salt i put like a clear coat on here thinking it would be good enough but it's not so i'm gonna have to buff this down and repaint this far from stock ac cover with some actual good paint because it's just completely rusted out after the winter but anyways my second thing i do to pretty much every vehicle especially at five nine cummins is i upgrade the air intake now with the the newer six seven cummins like fourth gens and fifth gens the factory ram air is actually pretty good so i don't think it's as big of a necessity as on like a five nine but here i have an snb cold air intake i run an oiled filter this one's pretty much ready for cleaning uh it's not too bad but uh yeah this is just gonna get you a lot better air flow it's gonna give you a little more power a little bit better fuel economy uh it's a little dirty down there but uh yeah that's the second thing they look a lot better and they sound a lot better you can hear more turbo whistle which is another cool thing that they do um and then yeah you have the option of getting an oiled filter or a dry filter for it it's kind of your choice they're both great all right number three what you guys probably do right off the bat and that is a programmer a tuner so i have an mm3 tuner it's got custom tunes on my truck because i have some things like bigger turbo other engine upgrades and i'll soon have bigger injectors and a bigger injection pump so i have custom mm3 tunes but like other options like smarty juniors are a great option it doesn't have to be mm3 and i mean unless you have unless you're doing like bigger turbo and injectors and that kind of stuff you don't really need anything custom so just any generic 5.9 tuners should be fine so what that tuner is going to do is it's gonna obviously give you more power that's the number one reasons why guys do it but i say be careful with that just because uh if you don't have other supporting mods which we'll get to shortly here uh you you run the risk of damaging your engine but another great thing that they do is uh when you program your truck typically your fuel economy goes up as long as you're a little responsible with your throttle pedal there but yeah so you get some more power and some better fuel economy and so yeah that's my third thing to do is uh tuner number four this one applies to pretty much any diesel truck out there too but it is an aftermarket lift pump so if you can see in here i have a fast fuel system and it kind of just hides underneath here you can see there's the filters kind of if you can see it and what that fast fuel system does is it's a much better upgraded lift pump and it supplies a ton of fuel right up to my cp3 injection pump so it's never hurting for fuel and you want to do this with that tuner especially because if you're cranking up your tuner you're going to be calling for more fuel in your injectors and sometimes your stock uh your stock lift pump can't keep up another great thing is uh they're super easy to service there's a fuel filter and a water separate separator right there uh super easy to get at super easy to change and they cross over to like hundreds of different companies filters you want to run cat filters you can you want to run wix filters you can you want ronald you want to run hastings filters you can do that so it makes it a lot it's way easier to find filters filters are affordable because you have so many different brands to choose from they're easy to service and uh what you can also do this one's kind of a bonus but down in here that's where the factory fuel filter is but see mine's gone i have a fleece fuel filter delete there and then it just bypasses it here's the hose right from my fast going right to my cp3 injection pump so yeah you can get rid of that fuel filter in the engine bay open it up a little bit that's kind of a canister filter and it's a little bit harder to service it's not bad but uh yeah another thing they do with with these lift pumps and you don't have to get a fast you can get an uh air dog or uh bd diesel whichever one you want they're all great but they also take all the air out of the fuel because there's still sometimes some air in the fuel so they completely get all the air out of the fuel more pressure better filtration they're just super good for your injection pump and your injectors if you want them to last a long time then an aftermarket lift pump like that is definitely the way to go all right number five has actually nothing to do with performance but i noticed a massive difference when i put this on my truck and what i'm talking about is this uh steering box brace or whatever you want to call it you can kind of use it in conjunction with this dual steering stabilizer but uh but no this brace right here your your steering box brace or i don't know what it's called i always forget the actual name but uh this bracket stiffens up your steering box and i'll put a little thing right up here in the description or in the top of the video on a video i did comparing it and the difference was huge i had so much steering slop before i before i had that brace i thought i needed a new steering box but i got that that one's a bd diesel product it's great um but yeah it was ridiculous how much it tightened up my steering wheel like it feel felt like a holy totally different truck i thought i needed a gearbox and i guess i don't um so that's a huge upgrade and like i said you could kind of use it in conjunction if you wanted to get that dual steering stabilizer as well those are great upgrades just to kind of keep that front end stiff on uh on on one of these five nine cummins because you don't want to get the death wobble i've never had the death wobble but i know people that have but doing stuff like this seems to help a lot all right now this one is kind of like the sixth thing you can do and like i said you're probably going to have to do it at some point uh and that is gonna be arp head studs so if you look on your truck you probably just have a bolt kind of right here and i mean they're obviously all underneath your valve cover here uh kind of in with your rockers but they bolt your cylinder head to the engine block and see i have studs if you can see them there's a stud there and then you spin the you put a washer on and you spin a nut on over top torque them down and what those are going to do is they are not going to stretch like a head bolt does so especially if you're running uh a hot a hotter tune like let's say you're putting 100 horsepower tune on your 5.9 and you romp on it your cylinder temperatures and pressures are going to be way higher and it can cause those factory head bolts to actually stretch just a tiny little bit but that's enough to get some pressure out of your cylinders and into your cooling system or blow your head gaskets and then you're pressuring up your cooling system or you're burning coolant off or you know you gotta do head gaskets so so here's what i say is like you're probably going to have to do it now when do you want to do it is up to you me personally unless i had a brand new truck i wouldn't do it until the head gasket goes because it's not very hard to do head gaskets on these trucks they are probably the one of the cheapest diesels to do a head gasket on so my advice is if you have you know something with 100 or 200 000 miles on it just wait let your head gasket blow and then when it blows replace your head gasket and use arp head studs instead of they say you can't even reuse your factory head bolts anyways so you're gonna either have to spend money to get if new head bolts or just spend the extra money and i know they're kind of expensive but spend the extra money and get arp head studs and you should never have to do this job again unless you just put a stupid high tune on your truck and you drive like a idiot so those are the main things i would do i mean obviously i have a lot more upgrades uh maybe i'll talk a little bit about them too in case you guys are wondering but uh yeah those are the the top five and then like i said head studs is number six i would uh strongly recommend you do to your truck if we go back to steering on mine another thing i did was actually this whole entire uh tie rod set up and you know this i upgraded to the new style it's a t-style steering this whole this whole steering system is from moog and it replaces everything basically on the front and these trucks factory come with a y style steering which is more prone to death wobble and i upgraded to that t-style steering so that same steering that you'd see on like a 2015 cummins it's on my 2003. i have the bd diesel screamer turbo that's the same turbo that's out of the six seven cummins it's a vgt turbo so it's pretty loud it's got a nice exhaust break to it uh it's a 64 mil so once i get my bigger injectors and bigger cp3 i should be able to put some some decent power on it anyways when i did my head gasket i also upgraded my push rods and my valve springs if i remember correctly they were manhattan valve springs and push rods i think but yeah what they do is just when you're kind of running at a higher rpm the stronger valve springs will keep everything in in place you know you don't start over revving your engine uh and then the the bigger the bigger push rods are just thicker they're stronger they can handle more abuse so i did that just because i knew i was building my truck up a bit obviously my truck has a suspension lift so i went with a bds six inch and i went with a long arm basically the long arm uh these are your long arms so they push your front axle forward to where it would normally sit when your truck is stock because if you think about it if you grab the truck and you pulled it up to lift it your your front and rear axles are kind of gonna they're gonna move in a little bit like that so by getting that long arm kit it pushes your front axle back to where it's supposed to ride so it's just a much better ride than if you just if you just have your regular control arms and then i got uh bd diesel uh traction bars here just uh to kind of eliminate some wheel hop and uh to make it so that under extreme load your diff will actually move uh and it's just really hard on your u-joints and everything so with those traction bars it just really keeps your truck solid i'll put a little thing right up in there if you're interested in seeing traction bars and what they do i have another video on that as well but that's most of the upgrades on my unit like i said bigger injectors and a bigger cp3 are coming soon there's obviously some cosmetic upgrades i have as well but you guys don't really care about those that much i don't think anyways but if you made it to this far thank you guys for watching let me know in the comments if there's a topic you want me to cover or a specific video that you want me to do and if i'm capable of doing it i will do it for you guys i'm more than happy to take suggestions i do kind of run out of ideas for videos so when you guys are actually giving me ideas it helps out a lot and yeah if you're new here feel free to subscribe i do a lot of diesel related content and check out the instagram at dark iron diesel but uh yeah thank you guys for watching and i hope to see you on the next video you

Channel: Dark Iron Diesel

Views: 156,835

Keywords: top 5 mods, diesel, smarty junior, bd diesel, ram trucks, dark iron diesel, best upgrades for diesel truck, fass fuel

Id: at3-PdojXd8

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021