PLEASE HELP!! ENGINE RATTLING & LOSS OF POWER
 

hello, ok heres what happend, i was in a deep mud pit and buried the front of my truck up to the hood. i got the truck out 3 hours later and drove it home. about half way home it overheated all the way to the red so i pulled over and found that the radiator was packed with mud. i filled the radiator with water and tried to rinse the radiator then drove home.i pulled up to my house overheated again. so i left it for the nite. the next morning i tried to start it and it turned over but sounded like it had no compression. i found out the air filter was packed with muddy water. i cleaned it and put a new filter and it fired right up. now the problem is it idles perfect but under load it rattles and has a loss of power.

sounds like you might have gotten a little water in there. considering it didn't hydrolock, if its like most cases I've had it will go away soon, the rattling is proabably a little misfire from the water being in there, but it should burn off. Make sure you clean that radiator out real well, and you might want to clean you're intake tube and plenum. proabably with some intake cleaner from autozone or whatever.

You may have to be more specific on the "rattle". Does it sound like the top or bottom end of the motor? Did you get the truck to stop overheating?

it sounds like from the top. it does not overheat anymore and it idles perfect. it sounds like the rattle if you have bad gas in your tank.

Sounds like preignition or "spark knock". Since you said your air filter was full of mud there is a chance you got mud in your air flow meter and it is causing it to run lean and knock. Have a look inside the meter and see if there is mud in there. It also could have gotten water in it and ruined it. There is ton of info on the board on how to test them.