Junkyard Find: 1984 Dodge Ram 150 Royal SE With Slant-Six Engine
Published: November 26th, 2018
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Can you imagine buying a new full-size Detroit pickup truck with the top luxury trim package and less than 100 horsepower? In 2018, such a truck would be smashed to bits by angry mobs, were it to appear in a showroom, but this half-ton pickup with 95 Slant-Six horses, four-on-the-floor manual transmission, and the Royal SE package would have been considered pretty nice, 34 years back.
The Slant-Six would run just fine no matter how cruelly you treated it, making it a great truck engine (if you didn’t mind very leisurely acceleration). This is the 225-cubic-inch version, rated at 96 horsepower; Chrysler put this engine in U.S.-market trucks and vans through the 1987 model year, after which it was replaced by the Magnum 3.9 V6 (aka three-quarters of a 318 V8). While the Slant-Six was the base engine in the D-series Ram pickups and vans for the 1981-1987 period, nearly all of them were purchased with V8s.
Real trucks had three pedals back in the 1980s, and this one has the rugged New Process 435 four-speed. Perhaps this transmission was overkill for an engine that made a mere 170 lb-ft of torque, but nobody complained.
The Royal SE package (which also went into Ramchargers) included a chrome grille, power steering, fake wood trim in the cab, and so on.
These door pulls are pretty classy.
Work trucks tend to stay in service for decades longer than ordinary cars, but this one finally reached the end of the line in Colorado.
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Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Being a life long n.e. Ohioan it pains me so to such rust free sheetmetal on such an old vehicle :( . That truck would have been a pile of iron oxide by its tenth birthday in these parts.
I about lost my mind with frustration over how slow my '77 Power Wagon was when I first had it. And it had the 2 barrel 360! I would have burned this thing, or gone looking for an engine to transplant. Everything was a pain to do in my truck, pass, merge, go uphill. I remember driving it to LA in June 1977 when it was a couple of months old and having it floored, and barely keeping up with traffic. I decided right then it had to be changed. First was an aluminum intake manifold and a Carter 4 barrel. Later on, it had a cam and lifters, headers, and ported heads. It was a lot of fun when it wasn't needing to be fixed. I lasted 4 years before I cracked and decided it had to go.