carb cleaner is nasty stuff it will quickly destroy any plastic or rubber components, Ive taken apart many carburetors that were ruined by it. it should only be used to remove gummy deposits from metal parts, and even then, i would only use it after milder solvents had failed.

any petroleum product is bad for rubber parts.

Yeah I don't think I'll be doing that.

What I might do tomorrow, weather permitting, is inspect all 6 plug wires one at a time, look for cracks or anything questionable.

I've heard an unlit propane plumbing soldering torch will do the same thing with the added benefit of being easy on plastic and not leaving any flamable liquid on hot surfaces. If by some fluke the engine somehow lights your torch you have a small controlled flame rather than an engine soaked in a lit lake of flammable liquid.

I've yet to try it, but I plan to use that method to leak test the vacuum system on my Lincoln Mark V...First I'll let the air intake suck some of that propane in to confirm it changes the idle noticeably, then start looking for vac leaks....Once it gets warm.

back in the early 80s,we used propane to adjust carburetors on ford products.i use brake cleaner to test for vacuum leaks.my friend has a 3.9 dodge 1500.it stumbled and idled rough.bad egr valve.stumbling could be anything.wires are a good start.keep us informed

The only thing worth trying is the water bottle to check for ignition problems....
However, once you know you have a reliable - working ignition system, you still
have a Dodge Dakota, and there is a known odd engine behavior that involves
stalling, stumbling, hesitation, etc. And there are several forums where people
have been battling these engine problems for a long time. Your best bet is to
use this vehicle over a number of months, note when some of the problems seem
to be better, or worse, and use this observation to search the forums, and google,
to see if you can move forward to a reasonable solution.

Since you just got this truck, and have had a few good days, and a few bad ones, it
will take a while to get to learn patterns.....

You might want to do some simple things, Get a voltage monitor, (analog with a needle)
And tap into the power line to the computer and be sure there is not an intermittent
connection related to bumps, stuff like that. Check to see if your car has a ground strap
from the engine to the chassis, replace it, add one, be sure it's working, because the
engine shakes all the time it's running, and if the ground is bad, all sensors may
be good, but poorly grounded to the computer..... Will it set a code for that ?????

Do a voltage monitoring to the fuel pump, ignition coil.... put it in the cab and watch it
when you drive, especially on trouble days.... Voltage check the ignition system,
you could have ignition switch with changing resistance when on.....

You might also want to get a fuel pressure gauge too, one for the cab..... Does not have
to be perminant.... Watch it for a good while, watch it closer on trouble days.....

You should do a reset of the computer now and then to see if it changes behavior....

There should be a few noise suppression caps around under the hood, you might want
to get new ones, be sure they are grounded......

Put on a vacuum gauge and put it in the cab, watch it on good and bad days..... Don't
forget it will read less on days the engine is not running well.....

Spraying carb cleaner at the engine or hoses is not going to help, you don't have a
constant leak, and it's not going to be big enough to make the engine run differently
if you spray anything at a leaky hose.... You can just physically check the hoses, and
connection points.... If anything you may have a leaky motor, or vacuum selector
for the heater controls.....

But then again, this car has been in the wild for 30 years, and several forums with
hundreds of postings and the problem still persists unsolved.... Be very very patient !

.

Interesting. Could you elaborate on that?

I'm not saying shoot it all over the engine willy nilly, I'm saying give a couple shots near the base of the intake and at the throttle body base. You can use a light fog of it on vacuum hoses as well. I use carb clean to clean greasy deposits on just about anything under the hood. I've been working on cars for almost 30 years and never melted anything doing so.

I would replace the wires trust me just for the piece of mind. They might look fine with no cracks but still be worn out. my 94 Saturn developed a dead cylinder after the catalectic converter stopped up even the wires were not that old I chased a dead no 1 and it would not miss all the time, so I replace the wires and solved the dead miss.

I've been thinking about this, and I think before I go shotgunning parts I need more data... meaning I need to narrow down when it does this and when it doesn't.

Today it's colder and drier, and I need to run an errand. Taking the camera with me. It will record the full drive. We'll see how it acts.

Truck went crazy today, then died!
 

Okay... Okay I made it home, barely. The truck started out right as rain, but on the way back home it started going nuts and it got worse and worse until it flat out stalled. Then I managed to limp it to my home street where it completely died half a block from home, I mean the ignition switch wouldn't do anything.

Fortunately I got it all on video!
https://youtu.be/9yij-eTxcvk

I drove for about 25-30 minutes total. I edited out most of the drive to the place I was going as the truck behaved fine. However I left the trip home mostly unedited. Around 4:40 in the video is when things get interesting.

So the video is a bit long but I think it can explain what this truck is doing far better then I can. I lucked out in that it died half a block from home.

Well, the video would have been more useful if you pointed it at the speedometer and
gas pedal at the same time so we could tell speed and gas pedal position.

But with the sound and description via audio, I would now take my chips and put 70%
of-em on a bad distributor, or something like bad intermitant spark, coil.....? and 20%
of my chips on fuel delivery, 10% TPS, MAP, Discounting the last 10% because no
codes are set.....

I don't think this is the standard Dakota engine problems on all the forums..... Spitting
through the carb is classic ignition problems.....

I had a wire go bad in our Prelude, I think it was 2 wires, A few years ago.
It would start, warm up & idle fine. Put it in gear - step on gas and it would
spit through the carb body, buck, all the stuff your tape sounded like.....

And it didn't do it all the time.... The carbon wire stuff got hot discolored
cracked at the very end near the spark plugs...... You could see it once you
pulled the boot off..... Cut it back, reattached it and they are still on the
car running today.....

You might have a distributor problem, pickup, or some other thingie in there....

.

Yeah I didn't want to hold the camera for that long of a drive, so that was the best I could do.

Showed this video to a couple other people, one whose been a mechanic for 40+ years. he says check the ground wire for the fuse box, and the ignition coil. also could be the crank sensor. So weather permitting I'm going to dig into the wiring tomorrow and swap some parts from my '92.

As you can see at the end of the video, the ignition switch just up and quit starting. Would like to sort that out first as right now it's not parked in the best of places.

Yah, I forgot to say also, my neutral safety switch does not let me start it up
on 1 out of 8 occasions too..... Could be N or P I will have to go up and down
the gears and back to P or N and try again.....

Yah, could be a ground or some wire around the fuse box, don't forget Dodge
has this giant plug that goes through the fire wall.... Last resort on that....

.

Oh yeah the neutral safety switch... I doubt it but that's not hard to swap.

But it looks like we're getting MORE SNOW so this will have to wait...