Recently bought a 2004 Hemi Ram. It was from a small dealer, but he did not have info from the previous owner. It has after market exhaust and a K & N filter. Seems to run really strong. A friend borrowed it and also said if felt strong compared to another Hemi truck he drives.

I bought a new superchips 3865, but have not used it yet. But am wondering, could it be tuned already? Is there anyway to tell? Or does it not really matter and i should use my 3865 and re-tune it?

Thanks!

 

Yeh, a fairly easy way to tell if you already have the superchips unit. Try to load a tune with it and if it won't let you, then it has a non-stock tune already loaded in it. The SC will not load a custom tune until it successfully downloads and saves the settings that are in there now and it won't be successful if it compares what it sees to the stock settings it knows should be there and they don't match.

How do I know this? I bought my truck new off a dealer's lot. It was a dealer transfer that had just come in and it had 600 +/- miles on it. It's never been plugged into a tuner that I know of. I bought a SC tuner, I'm pretty sure same one you have, and never could get it to tune my truck because it said my settings were not stock. I worked with SC tech support for several weeks and never could find a solution.

By the way, I've got the same truck and I've got a K&N and aftermarket exhaust and it runs strong too, but not as strong as it could if I wanted to throw more money at it.

 

Thanks for the info. I was hoping i could tell without opening the new tuner (could send it back then). Guess it could be sold as well.

Nice truck.

Am happy with mine so far, need to work in stereo install next. (Last night it got the K&N 57-1533 intake/filter put on, but i have not even driven since then!)
Also got new cooper tires and had a levelling kit installed. Sits nicer now.

 

Yep, my tires are cupping bad and wearing out faster than the last set. I'm sort of just letting them go on purpose - not rotating them often enough, etc. When I need new tires, going to drop down to some 17" aftermarket rims, more aggressive tires, and put a leveling kit on. I used to tow a RV with mine and it squatted my rear end, so I never leveled it. RV is gone now, truck retired from towing. So I'm going to be setting up over the next year or so for my son to take it over.

Not sure what to tell you about the SC. Maybe I could have pushed the issue with SC tech support and gotten them to refund me. But they kept promising they would figure out how to make it work. It wasn't their fault (best I could tell) that, for whatever reason, my truck settings aren't stock, but they did put some effort into trying to make it work. But, they'd send me a new program, I'd download it into the tuner, go plug it in, wait forever for it to finish, and it would fail again with the same error trying to save my settings. They didn't give up on me, but I gave up on them and got tired of fooling with it and sold it for close to what I paid for it. All I was really trying to do was get a better tune for towing. Otherwise, I'm happy with the power and the mileage I get.

If you don't have a history on the truck, I am not sure there is much else you can do to find out if you have a mod'd tune or not, than to try the SC. You can't borrow someone else's because of how they work. There's probably a person with a computerized mechanism somewhere that could tell you but good luck finding them.

Go look in the SC thread sticky. I think SC has a rep that posts here. Send them a pm and tell them your situation. Maybe they'll stand behind it for you.

 

Without someone adding a tune, it wouldn't have a non stock tune. I'm sure that neither Dodge or the dealer tuned it. Did they actually replace the tuner to see if another unit would tune it?
The only other possibility is that some lot goober tuned it but that would be a stupid thing to do because they would have rendered their tuner useless. I dunno. Just seems strange that it would give that error code on a new truck.
Did you ever try having the dealer reflash the PCM?

 

Why not just have the dealer reflash it to stock.. Then you know where its at, and the SC will work. That's what I did and I'm glad I did.

 

You guys talking to me or to the op? My truck has never been tuned but it was far from new when i tried the sc on it. Sc did a remote diagnostic of my unit and said it was fine. I have no local dealer anymore and i didnt feel it was worth it, to me, to pay for a reflash out of warranty. The dealer i bought it from may have done it for me for free but they were and are out of the chrysler biz.

 

Guy brought his truck over here so he could try my tuner on it. This was back when I had a 3815 and his truck was a VERY early '04, like an early summer '03 build date. I'd done this for probably half a dozen guys and never had a problem (almost all of whom ended up buying an SC after trying mine). Returned mine to stock, took the tuner to his truck and had the same problem you did, Greg.
I'm thinking some of the very early '04s had a subtle difference in the PCM tune that SC hadn't caught...

 

I am sitting in a deer stand so cant check my build date. But i didnt buy it until late 04. But, hammer, sc felt the same way about it. I remember somehow capturing my setttings and uploading them to sc, at their instruction. I think they gave 2 downloads to try after that and they still failed. I just gave up after that.

 

I wish I was in a deer stand!!! I did get two when I was up at the farm last month, but there is NOWHERE to hunt when I'm in Florida caring for my mom.

Twas a day when I lived in Georgia full time that I could basically take the ATV 400 yards from the barn and setup in a stand when I woke up in the morning. Get you one for me!!!