NJMurvin

My wife borrowed the truck on Sunday to make a Lowe's plant run. I noticed when she started it (truck was cold - but day was warm) there was a small puff of smoke (looked gray). As she was driving away, I also noticed a small amount of black smoke as she accelerated. Is this anything I should be concerned about? Or is this normal "cold" behavior for diesels? You'd think I would know all this by now. I bought it new in 04, have 64K on the clock and probably baby it way too much!! My work commute is about 3mi each way, but I try to blow it out on the FWY at least once a week. I'm overdue for a fuel filter change. I haven't checked the air filter but it was replaced at 60K.

carl48

this is normal. if you remove the cat you will even see more. several things on your truck. the 04.5 is what is called a common rail. it uses a high pressure pump and has electronic controlled injectors. the pump is called a cp3 it does not require the fuel for cooling and lube like its previous the vp44. the fuel filter media has many different size holes in it. the larger ones has less restriction to flow than the smaller ones. so they fill up first forcing flow through smaller and smaller holes. if you change your filter now you are throwing away a 2x better filter than the new one. get a taped banjo bolt from genosgarage.com for $7 a copper line oil pressure gauge installation kit from autozone for $11 and a 0-15 psi glycerin filled gauge from ww granger for $16. you will see about 7 psi. do not change filter until it drops to 0 psi under load. the cp3 needs better filtering than stock can do. bosch informed chrysler to not exceed 5 microns chrysler use 10 micron filter. it is better and cheaper to add filtering sending pix