Hello from IA

[75FordMan]

Been reading the forum for a few months and been planing on joining and finally did today. The trade was suggested by my wife due to her dislike of my 6sp manual 2018 CTD. To be fair I think Ram ruined the manual by only offering 3.42 gears. I had to upgrade my clutch to a dual disk due to it slipping in 4th and 5th pulling my flatbed and tractor.

I planned on re-gearing but when I looked up the value of my truck and reached out to a dealer with a tremor 3 hours away I found that they offered 2k less than what I paid OTD for my ram. So there was very little money out of my pocket for a nicer new truck. As a previous power wagon owner too I have to say I’m really impressed with the tremor in the first 1k miles.

 

[TreeHouse]

Hello And Welcome!! ???

 

[Charlie_Bravo]

Been reading the forum for a few months and been planing on joining and finally did today. The trade was suggested by my wife due to her dislike of my 6sp manual 2018 CTD. To be fair I think Ram ruined the manual by only offering 3.42 gears. I had to upgrade my clutch to a dual disk due to it slipping in 4th and 5th pulling my flatbed and tractor.

I planned on re-gearing but when I looked up the value of my truck and reached out to a dealer with a tremor 3 hours away I found that they offered 2k less than what I paid OTD for my ram. So there was very little money out of my pocket for a nicer new truck. As a previous power wagon owner too I have to say I’m really impressed with the tremor in the first 1k miles.

Hello, welcome and nice upgrades rig! Looks legit!

 

[75FordMan]

Hello, welcome and nice upgrades rig! Looks legit!

Thanks for the welcome everyone. BTW the ram had 35s but I put the stock steelies back on for the trade in. With 3.42 gears and the stock tires the truck had a minimum speed of 4mph at idle. Hard to back a trailer at 4mph in tight situations. It’s a shame too because I’m a huge manual transmission fan but the g56 in this truck shifted stuff from day one and the gears would have to be changed to be useful. I would get out of the ram and into my 75 highboy 4 speed and it would crawl in 1st and reverse and I always found myself in disbelief how much better driving experience my 75 was compared to a 2018 ram.

This being said I’m not bashing ram I had a 2012 g56 with 3.73 and put over 200k on that truck mostly problem free and loved it.

 

[modified]

Welcome to the forum and congrats on the new Tremor! ?

 

[PapaRaptor]

Welcome and great story. I had a few manual CTDs loved them but over time everything except the engine, trans and drive terrain went to hell. the best ones were the 5 speed. The 6 speed was the same first gear and 6 was the same as 5 in the older one. So you just ended up shifting more. Mine were older and had 4:10 if I recall. Not so good for the top end going down the freeway but they could tow. I can see the 3:42 not so good for heavy work.

 

[Briski]

Welcome and congratulations!!! Enjoy the beast ???

 

[75FordMan]

Welcome and great story. I had a few manual CTDs loved them but over time everything except the engine, trans and drive terrain went to hell. the best ones were the 5 speed. The 6 speed was the same first gear and 6 was the same as 5 in the older one. So you just ended up shifting more. Mine were older and had 4:10 if I recall. Not so good for the top end going down the freeway but they could tow. I can see the 3:42 not so good for heavy work.

Yeah the thing that probably irritated me more than the 4mph idle speed is that with the torque of the CTD and the force needed to turn the 3.42 gears on even stock tires and just under rated tow weight the clutch was slipping on hills in 4th and 5th gear. To me that is a major design flaw. Ram decided to only offer 3.42 in all srw 3/4 and up in 2016 I think was the year. It was a push for fuel mileage I’m sure but killed the manual. I’m sure they had already decided they were going to drop the manual when they made the gear decision. It’s sad to me that 2018 was the last year of any manual full size truck.
All that being said as much as I dislike automatic trans the 10 speed in the tremor is pretty good so far. I really like having the 4.30 gears. I had a power wagon with the 4.55 gears and it crawled nice and slow. Perfect for trailer maneuvering.

 

[75FordMan]

Thanks for the welcome everyone. Here is a pic of the ram before the stock steelies went back on for the trade. Traded it with 14k miles. Normally the trade would never have happened but like I said in a previous post the feted 2k less than what I paid otd for the ram and the difference for the 7.3 xlt was very very little. The ram was a tradesman so the xlt is actually a big step up comfort and tech wise. I’ve had higher trims but usually like a well optioned xlt level best.
I used the tremor to pull the 75 highboy home from the body shop with almost 900 miles on the clock. She did exceptionally well. I figured it’s close enough to the 1k break in mark it wouldn’t hurt. It was probably under 10k lbs too.