Been a bit since the last post. Figured I'd throw an update up here. About a week after I bought everything to do the drop and refresh the suspension, the truck tried to kill me. It died in the middle of an intersection on my way to work. Had to push it semi-heavy traffic uphill into a parking lot to try and diagnose what happened. Thought maybe the fuel pump died so I had someone that stopped to help turn the key while I laid under the truck to try and hear it prime since traffic caused too much noise for me to hear it from the cab. Fuel pump was priming so I my next thought was maybe filter was plugged. Stuck my knife into the Schrader valve at the intake and it was spraying plenty of fuel. Didn't have any tools with me to pull a plug and check for spark so while I waited for someone to come pull me back to the house, I started checking over fuses and relays to see if maybe it was something simple. No luck there. Everything checked out fine. Got it back to the house, pulled a plug and found no spark. Checked power at coil and it was good but no output from the coil. Simple fix, right? Wrong. Coil wasn't the issue, so I went ahead and replaced cam and crank sensors thinking one of those may have failed. Still no luck. I spent a couple of days tracing wires looking for any kind of short or possibly bad ground with no luck. Only thing I hadn't replaced was the ECM and I had put it off for so long because I never would have guessed that it would randomly fail like that. Searched around and found a company that sells reman ECMs hoping and praying that it was the issue as I had used up just about all time off from work that I could trying to fix this thing as it was my only transportation because I was dumb and sold my other daily to help a friend out. Took 2 weeks but I finally got it and it fired right up. Drove it fine for a few weeks with no issue..
Then the intake seals decided to leave the chat.. Tore it back down to replace those and all seemed well. That was until the engine decided it was finally done with life. I'm done putting money into the 4.3 and the truck is just going to sit for the time being at a friends house. I knew it was coming, I was just hoping I could band-aid it longer until I had another engine ready to go in it. Plan was to stick a 5.3 and a 4l80 in it but I've decided against that as I have a good 4 bolt main 350 block sitting around not doing anything so it will be headed to the machine shop in the somewhat near future as long as no other life hurdles come my way.
I know this is a long read, so props to you if you actually read the whole thing. I probably won't be too active hear for a while as now I will be on the hunt for a 3/4 or 1 ton truck I can use for hauling other vehicles/house materials around with. This truck will be nothing but a project/toy for quite a while. It has caused me entirely too many headaches and attempted to kill me too many times for me to trust it as a daily until every single thing on it has been replaced.