Well, There goes another one. Going down to GA this weekend to pick up a tractor and south of Chattanooga got the highly acclaimed (doom music here)......"Dead pedal". Made it down, got the tractor, ran across the scales, 16,400#'s, 4400#'s on rear axle, 3500#'s or so on the front axle, trailer axles were 8100#'s. Don't want DCX saying I over loaded my axles causing the harmonic vibrations from the less than ideal highway conditions to seperate the precision electronics of my VP44. Got Dead pedal twice outside of Chat, several times in Leesburg,GA and did it alot between Leesburg and Atlanta and quit after I stopped around Dalton for breakfast. Found the lovely P1693 on my key sweep.

So off to the dealer, I remember thinking many months ago when I first learned about the dreaded VP, that I hoped it died under warranty if it should happen to go. I guess not getting any performance mods on my truck and sticking to it was a good thing. Seems like these things are dropping like flys around here.

On a good note however, even though I got the dead pedal many, many times on the 1000 miles or more once we (me and my two kids, 7 and 5 years) started heading up Monteagle the truck never did anything bad, just pulled all the way up without a problem, Regardless of the sour VP I love this Cummins!!! The truck too!!! It made it another 200 miles to my house without a lick of trouble, how weird is that.

Oh, if you get dead pedal syndrome, leave it in gear, let off the throttle, turn the key off and then back on, hit the throttle. Don't know why it worked for me but every time I got the dead pedal I did that and it would take right back off, saved me on a few small hills.

 

If its any consolation, the 1693 isn't a VP death code. It just means that there is a code in another module. Maybe its just a bad APPS? How was your FP?

 

fuel pressure was 7psi coming up a 6% grade in 4th gear at 60mph. The truck actually was willing to go 65mph but then my egt's started pushing 1200 so I backed out of it and got down to around 1050. During my "dead pedal" times fuel pressure was around 9-10psi and during this whole 1200 mile journey at 70-75mph the fuel pressure was always between 7-10psi and at idle it was at a steady 12psi. So according to the boys at the Cummins shop, anything over 5psi is good.

That's alright though my buddy has a code reader and we checked it out tonight and his would not show the P1693 but it showed the infamous death code.....P0216. So we are headed to the Dodge dealer in the morning to drop the truck off for the week and let them fix the leaking axle seal, the driver mirror that won't hold in place, the intermittent wipers that are not so intermittent, check the oil leak on the engine and of course cure the dead pedal. Bad thing is being an experience auto tech I've practically diagnosed the whole thing already, should just tell them they need to order such and such parts and be done with it.