I recently purchased a 2004 SE. I have taken the entire truck apart. Going to be rebuilding almost everything. I took the engine out and tore it down, at that time I noticed the heads do not have SAI, but the truck has SAI pump and solenoid. How can I verify if the truck is SAI or not.

 

I’m not positive but I’ve had both and from what I’ve read before, the odd of a non-SAI ‘04 are pretty rare. Did you run it before taking it apart? As such do you recall during your disassembly if the connections were there for the SAI? Sorry, probably not much help but perhaps can point you in a direction…

 

I bought it almost as seen in the last photo. So no I do not know about its running condition. I actually was not paying any attention to SAI when I bought it. In my mind they all have it. I only actually discovered now that there were some without, and that was because I pulled the heads and saw that they didn't machine the holes for it!

 

My ‘00 didn’t have it and I’d prefer not to as the system can cause some headaches.

And sorry, I can’t see any photos, but that could be because I run a VPN- used to give me fits when I was in Euroville.

Anyway, what is entirely possible if it was a non runner is that someone let it overheat to the point the heads were messed up and wanted to get rid of the SAI system and just founds some heads that were not SAI and never removed the system? Folks every now and then try to do this, but it creates some headaches for inspections and the CEL and the like.

Bottom line, if there aren’t any holes in heads for the pipes, I’d say someone swapped the heads.

 

Yes it had SAI. Someone removed it. The only way I know of to avoid a check engine light is to install a pre SAI ecu.

 

Your truck doesn't seem to have these SAI valves, the big round pots in the center of this picture, which are a large part of the system. You do seem to have the air pump in the far pass side corner of the engine bay. As LTS pointed out, it's certainly possible that someone removed parts of the system, including the heads with the ports that accept the tubes off the T pipe below the valve in this photo, but just doing that also creates collateral issues as he also mentions. The only way to completely remove SAI, no matter what parts have been taken off, it to address the fact that the ECU will be looking for SAI activity and will generate the associated codes if it doesn't. You can swap the truck's electronics from a non-SAI truck which would include the ECU, BCU, & cluster at minimum, or perhaps reprogram what's original to the the truck with a textbook or nanocom but that's outside of my experience. Swapping those parts would lead to a VIN mismatch which would likely show up at inspection time (AMHIK), but the bottom line here is that since you don't have the valves, you don't have a functioning SAI system. Those heads in your pic also do not seem to have the necessary ports either so it appears that some swappage has occurred.

 

Ok thanks for the replies. I did know that there would be a problem when I put the truck back together and the engine is not sai and the ecu is. I tried vin decoder and it didn' t give me much useful info and I searched online here and everywhere, I was hoping someone knew how to verify what the truck came with from factory. I guess I need to assume it is an SAI truck with swapped heads, probably more likely entire engine. It did not have any evidence anyone had taken apart the heads from this engine.

 

If they swapped the entire engine than you need to verify if it's a 4.6 or a 4.0. The 4.6 was never offered without SAI so it's probably a 4.0 if the heads have never been off.

 

crank is 4.6 I can verify that

 

Fuel pumps are different for SAI & non SAI. Pop the hatch n take a peek to verify 100%.