If you should have what 1st appears to be a blown headgasket or what you think may be a blown freeze plug,.... then 1st pull the valve cover and look at the head in the rocker/valve spring area. I believe I counted 11 small freeze plugs that some are calling "soft plugs". When one of those blows you dump a bunch of antifreeze directly into your crankcase. These plugs are like I said in the valve cover area and are maybe 1" in diameter. Be sure to check them 1st if you have an immediate overheat condition.

I have been questioning around and a number of them are surfacing so beware!

 

Thanks for the heads up...

 

Good advice, thanks for sharing

 

Good info for guys in the market for a truck...

 

Yeah X2! Never heard of this happening before until this thread.

 

Now don't take my post as a reason to boycot 04.5-05 trucks. It just seems like that almost every production year of a vehicle presents its on set of problems/issues.

I talked to Rip @ Source Automotive about this and he suggested a pre-emptive fix of peening the edge of each of these soft plugs to prevent this from occurring. They are easy to get to once you remove the valve cover so that would be an easy possible fix.

Now this is NOT an absolute but the 3 examples of this I've found in as many days when just asking around with people I just happened to be talking to the one common factor was each of the trucks were being run at high rpm at the time. There are some common possibilities for the failure in addition to high rpm running. For example,.. maybe the installer at the factory isn't getting them knocked or pressed in as deeply as they should or maybe the sealer used for their installation is inferior,.. something like that. That's what DCX gets for hiring new guys,.. right!!

 

I thought the engine was mechanically unchanged from 04.5 thru 07.. .so shouldn't 06-07 have the same issue?

 

I expect the ejection pressure on each soft plug would only be around 60 lbs total at 3500 RPM, so it probably is a Monday morning/Friday afternoon issue - or there would be a lot more CRs demonstrating this problem.

Especially in view of the fact that none of the freeze plugs in the block blew out...

 

good to know, thanks!