ok well i was talking to some friends recently and they commented on how the engine in my car doesnt look like 130K miles, heres a pic, whats a easy preferable free way to tell if the engine was just cared for or if its a engine swaped car? there were no papers with it when i bought it.

 

what year is your car?

 

its a 2000

 

That's a 3.8? If so it looks to have a split-port injection set-up not sure if that was stock or not on that year but a buddy of mine has a 02 3.8 and it looks nothing like that, it looks more like mine and it's a 97 and it has close to 150k on it, but the guy I bought it from said the motor has been rebuilt/replaced not to sure though since there were no papers for me either.

Here is a pic of mine:

 

whats another way to tell for certain than by looking at pictures?

 

99 was the first year for the split-port engines in the Mustang.
To the OP. You probably just have a very nicely taken care of V6, or someone who owned the car before you blew the original V6 and replaced it. You still have the same engine that came in your car so that is really all that matters.

To the other guy with a 97. If your friend has an 02 with a single-port engine then he got ripped off. lol

I forgot how ugly the stock air intake looks. lol

 

The 2000 did come with the split port.

 

The 99-04 V6's are all the same. You still have a split-port motor so it doesn't really matter whether the engine was swapped out or not.

The only difference is that the 04's had a 3.9L that did nothing for their performance.

 

well it does matter cause if it was swapped i can load a super charger onto it and be good to go but if it has 130K miles on it im not going to do that.

 

Well if you are going to 'load' a supercharger onto it then maybe you should rebuild the engine/ forge the engine.

How do you know that if the engine was swapped that it wasn't swapped out with a higher mileage engine that what was in it to begin with?