I'm Wade with Thoroughbred Diesel, and today we're going to talk to you about a Breakout
Box for a VP 44 truck.
If you own a 1998 to 2002 VP44 Dodge truck or you happen to work on these trucks quite
a bit, you've heard the term Breakout Box.
As a Cummins distributor, we actually sell the official Cummins Breakout Box, which is
what we're going to talk to you about today.
We're going to introduce you to the box, we're going to introduce you to the tool, and we're
also going to show you how to properly use it.
Now, I want to talk just a little bit about the Breakout Box, so just an overview of what
the Breakout Box does.
The Breakout Box will allow your VP44 truck to run independently of the ECM.
That is its basic, basic function.
Now what happens here is, one thing that this will not replace, if you have a lift pump
failure or the truck is out of fuel, which is a very, very common thing with '98 to '02
trucks, because the fuel gauges in them all break.
At a quarter of a tank of fuel you're on vapor's last lung anyway, so this will not fix your
truck, or it will not tell you if your truck has a problem with lift pump pressure.
It will not tell you if you're low on fuel or you've got cavitation of the fuel or air
in the fuel or anything like that.
What this is going to do is, this is going to tell you if you've had an ECM failure of
the truck that is not allowing the truck to start, or if you've got a wiring harness failure
that's not allowing the truck to start, and some other failure modes that you're going
to see that this is going to isolate.
A lot of times on ECMs on VP44 trucks is what we see happening is, you'll start the truck
and then all of a sudden it's at 300,000 RPM, just right out of the gate.
You just look at the throttle and it goes wide open.
This will isolate that because it isolates the VP44 from the ECM power and control supply.
I just wanted to bring out a VP44 here today and I wanted to show you how this hooks up,
before we go installing it on the truck and when you won't be able to see quite as much
as what we're doing.
Here is the Breakout Box itself.
You've got the controller hookup where it hooks to the back of the VP44.
You have the control box itself, and it's got a high and low idle button on that.
I'll show you the functionality of that here in just a second.
Then you've got a fuel shut off button as well.
Then you have the power and the ground leads that hook directly to your battery.
I'm going to show you outside of the truck, how this actually hooks up.
The VP44, the computer on the top of the VP44 is called the PSG.
You'll hear us talk about the PSG quite a bit.
This is the outward side where your fuel lines hook into the VP44, so just remember that.
I'm going to turn this kind of forward here to where I can show you the fuel pump module
hooking on.
To hook this on, you just make sure that the [bale 00:03:06] is slid out completely and
then slide this on the PSG of the pump.
Then push the bale forward and the bail will engage.
Excuse me, the bail will engage the two tabs that are on the pump that drive it on home
and lock it in there.
Now, that's actually a very good representation of what can happen here.
This is actually a good thing on your wiring harness.
You want to make sure that your pins inside of your wiring harness are not pushed back
or bent or any of those things, and make sure that the pins inside of your PSG as well are
in good shape here.
It engages these two tabs that are on top of the PSG.
Again, we just push that on there and start putting a little bit of pressure on our locking
tab until our locking tab goes in and clicks like that.
That is installing a PSG.
This is just a nice view of the pump outside of the truck so you know what's going on here.
Now let's show you how to use the Breakout Box.
Okay, we're ready to hook our Breakout Box up to our VP44 truck.
It's worth mentioning it here again and I don't mean to be redundant.
What we're doing is we are working with a no start condition of this truck, or just
a crazy high idle or something like that, or something that we're thinking that it's
an ECM failure.
We're trying to isolate that by using this Breakout Box.
Again, worth mentioning again, this is not going to tell you if you've got a lift pump
problem, or if you've got low fuel or no fuel.
You have to have a good fuel supply to the truck.
Even though the Breakout Box is going to be independently supplied, independent of the
truck's ECM, the ECM is still going to send signal to the lift pump.
The lift pump is going to be running.
The truck is going to be running.
Here we go.
First thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to make sure that
you do not hook up the power wires.
First, you're going to want to go for the pump wires here on the back of the VP44.
Just like we showed you on our model, we just go ahead and take the bale, pull it out till
it clicks in and unhook it from the VP44.
This is a real good time to check your pins to make sure that none of them are bent or
pushed back in or anything of that nature.
We see a lot of failures like that.
Now we're going to bring the Breakout Box hookup in here.
I'm going to go ahead and slide ... [inaudible 00:00:06:01].
Got it.
There you go.
All right, push that until it clicks just like that.
Now we've got our Breakout Box on the VP44.
We'll come out underneath the hood here.
There's a lot of cord with this unit, so I will go ahead and widen my box out till I've
got enough room and I've got it away from my fan, because you don't want to, especially
if you're trying to do this by yourself, you don't want this to get caught up in the fan.
Then you're going to take the ground and hook it to your battery ground here.
Then you're going to hook it into your positive.
You're going to notice that you heard the VP44 click.
That is completely normal.
The power light on the Breakout Box will light up.
Now you can just get inside and simply start the truck.
All right, so we've got our truck running.
You'll notice that it's got a little bit of a different tone and idle here.
Okay.
What we're going to want to do now is I'm going to show you what the high/low idle control
does.
The truck is going to start in the low idle condition per the box.
If you want to change the idle to make sure that the truck itself will take throttle control,
you can hit the high/low idle button.
Hit the high button, the idle will change on the truck.
You can let go of it, and it will go to the actual high idle.
The truck, when you first start is going to start in low idle, but once you push this
button the first time and release it, it will go to high idle.
If you want to go to low idle, you simply press and hold the high/low idle button.
Let go of it, it goes back to high idle.
Press and hold it, it goes to low idle.
When you're ready to shut the truck off, you hit the shutoff button while you have it at
low idle.
I like to do it at low idle.
I think it's easier on the truck.
You just hit the shutoff button here, press and hold, shuts the truck off.
There you go.
That is functionality of a Breakout Box.
Again, this is not going to tell you if you've got a problem with your lift pump system or
you're out of fuel, cavitation in the fuel or anything like this.
This is basically to diagnose a no start condition on a truck that you're trying to figure out
whether you've got an ECM problem, or if you've got a VP44 problem.
This makes the VP44 completely independent of the ECM.
Nothing downstream of the ECM is going to be able to mess this pump up.
It's on VP44.
If you're wanting to figure out if it's a VP or the ECM, it's a no start condition,
you've got good lift pump, this is going to tell you the two.
You put this on there and the truck doesn't start, you're probably looking at VP44.
This is a very, very good tool for shops that are doing a lot of VP44 installations.
I definitely suggest for you to have this on your shelf.
Very good tool for diagnostics.
If you have a question about this installation, or if you have a question about this tool
or any of our other videos, if you've got any questions about how to check lift pump
pressure, or any of the things that lead up to VP44 diagnosis, and if we can help you
with the purchase of a VP44, we will be glad to do that as well.
I'm Wade with Thoroughbred Diesel.
If you've got any questions, give us a call.
Thank you.