How to Check Oil Level 1994-2002 Dodge Ram 1500

Hey friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today we're going to be working on our 1996 Dodge Ram 1500. This is the 5.9 and I want to show you something very basic, checking your oil level. If you come right over here, you'll notice you have your engine oil dipstick, it says engine oil on it. It's backwards for you, but it is what it is. I'm sure you can read upside down. And just pull out your dipstick. I'm just going to wipe it off. Turn this way.

On the dipstick, you can see it says there's a safe zone and an add zone. If your oil level is someplace in between here and this line, you need to obviously add, so you're in the safe. That would be approximately half a quart to a quart. One quart will probably put you up at the max line there. Optimally, you would want to be anywhere between the top of the safe line and the bottom of the safe line, right in the middle. Perfect. I got to tell you, if you come up this way and you're sitting above the full, that's gonna be an issue. You're going to have aerated oil. You're going to have oil pump problems and potentially harm your engine. I'd rather have my oil a little bit down into the add than anywhere above the safe zone.

To continue, let's go ahead and check the oil. Just put this right in here. Look at that. I put it so you can see it this time. Pull this up, turn it around. Sorry. So as you can tell, we're right inside the safe zone. The way that you want to check your oil is you want to make sure your vehicle is parked in a level area. If you have a nice level driveway or parking lot or whatever you may have. And, of course, you want to run the vehicle, turn it off, let it sit for maybe a minute or two and then check your oil level. It should be right here. Let me get that off of there. There we are. Just wipe this off again. I like to wipe them off before I put them back in the dipstick tube.

So let's say, that for some reason, your oil was low. We got that in there. We're going to go over to the oil fill, which is located on the other side of the engine. And you've got a nice yellow cap on this. Yours may be black, I don't know for sure, but you'll have a cap on this side of the valve cover. Just take it with a little spin. Take it off, check your seal. This one's pretty dirty. Just wipe it off real quick. We'll clean it up nice and we'll double check it.

We want to look to see if there's any cracks or splits in this. If there's either of those, you'd want to replace your cap. To add oil, you just take your oil jug, whatever you've got, put it right in there, whatever you needed, half a quart, full quart, whatever it may be. Try not to spill., Because if you spill it comes down, the valve cover gets down here. It might get onto your exhaust manifold. That's going to be a really stinky, smelly mess once it gets hot. And, of course, any oil that goes on the ground is going to contaminate the ground, which is very bad as well. We'll just clean off this cap real quick.

This vehicle's only a 96. So it's seen its day. That looks pretty decent. We could do a better job if we wanted to. But for the purpose of the video, we'll just put it back on, turn it all the way to the right until it stops. Gives it one click and that's it. We know it's nice and tight. Now that we know that the caps back on there, you double check your oil, if you did have to add any, of course. Make sure that you're at the level that you want. And then, close your hood and down the road you go. Easy-peasy.

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