All right, here's the sob story (really it's just idle whining at this point) on how I acquired my big Dodge.
Few years ago I had a '99 Dakota that had been paid off for about 18 months with about 147k miles on it. Ran fine, but I was getting a little tired of the fuel bill every week. Decided I needed to keep a truck but needed better mileage, a 2500 Cummins powered Dodge fit that bill, plus I could haul anything I'd ever need to. As luck would have it my brother-in-law(BIL) had a nice old '98 Dodge with the 24V and he really wanted to down-size. his was an automatic truck, but I figured if the price was right I'd be ok with it. Told him I thought my truck was worth about $5k and thought his was worth about $12k (4x4, quad cab, 167k miles, decent shape, showing the miles but not worn out). He said that sounded good and I bit down.
Now, I had heard the stories of him roasting the transmission once, then following that up a second time due to a failed pump, but all seemed to be ok for now. 2 weeks before we're going to trade trucks he calls to tell me he bumped someone in their rear and bent the front bumper a tad didn't ruing anything else. I figured a little bump on the nose wasn't any big deal. Then just as we're getting to town and ready to trade he tells me, well the transmission started slipping again. Great. Well, tried to limp it to my dad's shop to see what was wrong, ended up having to get it towed in. Other issues I already knew on the truck and had planned for Dad's shop to fix: heater core was bad and tires were worn out plus they were only c-load range tires. Now we had to add transmission work to the bill. The tech flushed it out and changed the filter, had all its gears anyway and seemed to be ok so I had them start on the tires and heater core so I could take my new truck home.
Work got completed and we headed out of town, I was happy. Got 30 miles down the road, pulled over to check something in the bed and when I took off there was a sickening bang followed by no movement of the vehicle. Called a wrecker to get towed back to the shop and found that the transmission just gave up again. We had borrowed a car to get back home while Dad's shop worked on the truck. At this point I started looking at options. BIL was willing to take it back to the same guy who rebuilt this transmission twice, but I didn't trust that too much since it failed twice now, plus the truck had to come 500 miles to get to me, I asked if the guy might guarantee his work for say 90 days or something. BIL said that would be unfair. Dad could get a Dodge reman for a decent price but turns out the cooling circuit had been jacked on an earlier job and Dodge would require the coolant tank and proper air cooler hooked back up to give their 60k mile warranty on the transmission.
At this point I was already in for the tires and heater core and since BIL wanted to jack me around with garage work on the transmission I offered to unwind our deal and I'd give him the tires and heater core (my lesson for a bad deal) and he could just give me that running Dakota back. Answer was that he couldn't afford to do that because of the payments on the diesel truck. I was stuck, so I just bit down hard and had the proper transmission job with a warranty done. Cost more than I wanted in the truck but now a number of years later I came out ok, the truck still runs like a champ and it's been paid off for a long time plus this truck is worth more than that Dakota would be by now and I'm getting much better fuel mileage. In the end I won (word on the street was that BIL ended up with that Dakota getting re-po'd), but it sure was a rocky start out of the gate.
So, now I've owned the truck a few years and just a year or so ago the exhaust pipe after the muffler rusted out. Had to remove that section of pipe and haven't decided what would be best as a replacement. A shiny new MBRP unit would definitely be awesome!
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and those in the path of the Mississippi!!! 
