2000 Dodge Ram Cummins - The Point of No Return

[JoeThaMan]

2000 Dodge Ram Cummins - The Point of No Return
Originally, this truck was Tom Colesanti's daily driver. After a while, he decided he wanted to take his '00 Dodge sled pulling, which prompted him to make a few modifications. A few soon turned into many, as Tom really started to get into the sport, ultimately leading him to go to the extreme of putting a Scheid P7100 injection pump on his truck. With this setup, he could get the huge fueling capabilities of the earlier 12-valve engine combined with the superior airflow of the 24-valve design-the best of both worlds. Although the truck still has license plates, Tom says its street days are pretty much over. "Shifting a manual transmission with the hand throttle is pretty hard," he laughs. It's clear that the truck has reached a competition-only state, which Tom is more than happy with. He is even considering eventually upgrading the truck to a Modified class puller.
Since Tom's truck is one of the few P-pumped 24-valves we have seen, we were pretty anxious to look under the hood to see how it was done. Most serious 12-valve pullers rely on a shop-built P-pump and oversize lines, so Tom didn't mind much when he purchased a set of conversion lines and a pump from Scheid Diesel. The only hard parts were the front timing cover (which had to be an earlier 12-valve version) and the throttle. Tom fixed his throttle linkage situation by converting the truck to a hand throttle.
With a serious pump that was ready to make some horsepower, Tom then addressed the engine. He knew the truck was going to spin almost 5,000 rpm, so the block was studded with 14mm main studs, a Scheid billet cam, and a ported, polished, and fire-ringed Scheid head. A set of 14mm head studs keep the head gasket from blowing itself to pieces. While Scheid did all of the machine work, the engine itself was actually assembled by Tom and Craig Johnson at Big Power Diesel in Palmdale, California. Craig also supplied a custom set of injectors to help Tom produce outrageous horsepower.


All that fuel won't do any good without a bunch of air, so Tom chose a big single turbo from Turbonetics to provide plenty of boost to the engine. The monster Turbonetics ball-bearing turbo with a 3-inch inducer hooks into an ATS Bigfoot T-4 exhaust manifold before exiting out through a 5-inch exhaust system. The last part of the equation was reliability, so Tom upgraded his engine with a Fluidampr harmonic balancer, and his transmission with a trick triple-disc clutch. The rearend was locked, while the frontend was fitted with an ARB air locker to make sure each of the four wheels are pulling evenly.
So did all Tom's hard work pay off? When we first saw the truck at last year's DHRA pull in Las Vegas, Tom had been bounced out of the Street class due to a hand throttle, and other various infractions. Despite having to run a class higher in Super Street, the truck still bested the competition on Saturday's pulling event, with a winning 321-foot full pull on a 300 foot track. Not content to rest on his laurels, look for Tom and his wife Sara to attend as many West Coast events as they can in '08 with his mechanically injected pulling monster.

Photo Gallery: 2000 Dodge Ram Cummins - Competition Diesel Trucks - Diesel Power Magazine



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