It blew up. But first a little backstory.

Went to the junkyard yesterday, only found one starter. The Raider is gone, there's only 4 Ram 50s left, two of them were missing the engine and trans, one had just a shortblock, and the last one was missing the distributor and carburetor...

The junkyard starter is a Bosch remanufactured unit, it works really well. At first I thought the solenoid spring might be broken or just weak, because it sounded like the gear wasn't fully retracting once the engine was running. I had the same sound with the ACDelco remanufactured starter, and the solenoid spring was much thinner and weaker than the solenoid spring in the old gear reduction starter.

So when I started the truck this morning, the oil light stayed on for a few seconds after the engine started and the rattle that I thought was the starter gear was quite a bit louder. The oil light went off after about 10 seconds of idling, and the rattle stopped after I bumped the throttle to back out of my driveway. The oil light has done that almost every time I started the truck before, but it usually went off after 3-5 seconds.

I drove it across post, parked it for an hour, and when starting it the second time the oil light went out almost immediately. The rattle didn't stop until I started driving away, but I could still hear a little bit of what sounded like the gear catching on the flywheel a little when I started off from a stop, and I heard it a few times after shifting gears or around corners. I was planning on pulling the starter off tonight after work, but I needed to head to work and I felt like the truck was ready for a long distance road test. I had prepared as much as I could, I double and triple checked everything, and I headed out. This time the rattle was a little more pronounced, but it went away pretty quickly. The oil light went off after 5 seconds of idling, and the rattle was intermittent and random. It was running great, I was cruising at 55 mph for about 20 miles, and then suddenly the oil light came on, the engine was slowly dropping in RPMs regardless of what position the throttle pedal was at, and it stopped as soon as I let off the throttle to pull off on a side road. I coasted about 50 feet, turned on the hazards and sat there for a moment hoping it was just a wire that came unplugged or something else small.

I popped the hood, there was nothing unplugged but I did see a small wisp of smoke out of the breather. I looked at the dipstick, there was still plenty of oil in the engine and I couldn't see anything obvious on it. I tried starting it again and smoke started puffing out of the breather, but it started. It died again after a few minutes, and after that refused to start and it sounded like the starter was fighting to turn it over. I pulled the dipstick again and found sparkles.

So now I get to pull the engine, pull it apart, figure out what went wrong and where, and go from there.

YAY!