First post, but wanted to share a problem solved because of reading many threads.

2003 with 165k when I bought it 10 months ago. Had an annoying tick on startup and acceleration only. Found a hole in one of the SAI pipe tubes (passenger side towards front of truck). Couldn’t see it but felt hot air coming out the bottom of the tube. Don’t touch cuz it’s hot!

Didn’t want to spend the $200 for the new part (yet) so applied a liberal amount of JB Weld extreme heat paste for $7 and the tick is gone!

I’ll update if it doesn’t hold, but it’s supposed to hold to 1300C.

 

Interesting. I might do the leakage test again with focus on those tubes. So far I tested only the exhaust pipe connections. After fixing my leaks, a little tick is still there sometimes and, it sounds different now.

 

Like, the crimped tubes that run along the manifolds?

 

The accordion-like tubes. You can see my jb weld job here. I put it all around even though the hole is on the other side.

 

It’s the accordion style tubes. You can see my sloppy JB weld job

 

The weak point on that material and repair normal winds up being the adhesive bond to the tubes. A couple tricks I use:

1. coat the tube with the JB weld all the way around the tube. The JB weld bonds very strongly to itself, so that way when it cures it basically forms a solid ring around the tube.
2. I put a coat of JB weld on, wrap it in tightly wound stainless steel wire, then a coat of JB weld on top of that. The wire holds the jb weld in place.

It isn't pretty, but it does work.

Hopefully your repair holds and doesn't need touching up.

One more trick to prevent damaging the tubes when removing - remove the plug wires and you can fit an open end wrench on the square fitting and hold it while getting a different wrench on the hex fitting, that way the stainless tube does not twist.

 

Thanks for the advice, hopefully mine holds. But yes, I ended up having to wrap the JB weld all the way around. Hope this helps anybody else with this issue too.