This 2003-2009 Dodge Ram 5.9L/6.7L Cummins Transmission Cooler is now available! Click here to check it out!

After all the time spent designing, welding, prototyping, and fitting, we were more than anxious to test the cooler and see if all our work would pay off.

Testing wouldn't be easy though. The weather outside was growing colder every day, and cold is the enemy when you're trying to push the limits of a heat exchanger. Nevertheless, on-road testing would yield the most relevant results for our customers, so we had to try. We hitched a trailer to our 5.9L Cummins volunteer truck, loaded our 6.7L Powerstroke, and hit the road. Temperature sensors in the inlet and outlet of the transmission cooler would let us know when we had maxed out the cooling potential of the stock cooler. Once the inlet and outlet temperatures leveled out, we could record the final temperature and swap in our cooler to repeat the test. But the temps never leveled out.

Each trip back down the hills of eastern Maryland

This 2003-2009 Dodge Ram 5.9L/6.7L Cummins Transmission Cooler is now available! Click here to check it out!

As our volunteer truck rolled into the shop, Dan began gathering his tools for a short, and ultimately rewarding, install. Removing the intercooler was second nature to him and before long, the stock transmission cooler was sitting next to its former home. Our much larger, much better-looking replacement took up residence in the truck with only two bolts. After months of work, the test fit was complete.

Before we could begin testing, there were still a few final details to be worked out. You might notice that the lines fitted to our cooler are not the stock lines, and there's a good reason for that. The stock lines for the 2003-09 Ram utilize a quick-disconnect style fitting at the cooler. After 14 years of water, dirt and road salt, those quick-disconnect fittings were more like slow, painful, frustrating-disconnect fittings.

After spending hours soaking our first volunteer truck's

This 2003-2009 Dodge Ram 5.9L/6.7L Cummins Transmission Cooler is now available! Click here to check it out!

From the outside, you wouldn't think that the modern pickup truck is exactly the evolution of Henry Ford's Model T. Under the surface however, you might find that the two are more related than they appear. The Model T was a car, built for the masses, designed to be affordable, approachable, and to get people where they wanted to go.

It didn't take long for Ford and other manufacturers to realize the potential of an affordable utility vehicle. A vehicle that helped them work, so that they could afford to go places in their car. Pickups have grown to sell almost twice as well as cars since the Model T "Runabout" was introduced in 1925, and it's hard to find a vehicle that can do as much as a pickup. For all the development that has happened in nearly a century, the pickup could still use some improvement to make it a better workhorse.

One of the most worthwhile improvements, in the

This 2003-2009 Dodge Ram 5.9L/6.7L Cummins Transmission Cooler is now available! Click here to check it out!

To be completely honest, I've never owned a truck. Apart from Dakar rally trucks, I prefer subtlety and agility over brute force and utility.  I've also never owned a grizzly bear, but I still respect them.  Without trucks, our economy would come to a halt, nothing would ever get built, and my subtle and agile car would be wasting away in the salty air of Baltimore's port, if it even made it that far.

It may not seem like it when you compare live axles and leaf springs to modern multi-link suspension systems and torque vectoring rear-diffs, but trucks are an impressive feat of engineering. They are capable of completing Herculean amounts of work, and must be robust enough to harness massive amounts of power, without disintegrating along the way.  In the case of the 3rd generation Dodge Ram 2500 and 3500, the 5.9L or 6.7L Cummins engines provide up to 650 lb-ft of torque to