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My truck has the manual HVAC controls with the 3 dials, and the temp selector knob quit working. It would only blow cold air. I discovered it was because the plastic shoulder that holds the cable to the control assembly broke. Theoretically I could have epoxied it back in there, but I discovered the other shoulder for the vent selector cable was close to breaking, and the back frame of the assembly had another crack in it. So I decided I should just replace it. Unfortunately you can't just replace the frame. It only comes as a whole assembly including the fan control, knobs, other switches, and cables - part number 27130. But for Nissan, this part was very reasonable $144 from Courtesy. In comparison, to just replace your clock is an astronomical $160. Upon receiving and reinstalling the part, I discovered the cables are not designed to be removable from the control assembly. You have to remove the cables you have from the HVAC system, which is no easy task. I'm not sure one could do the vent selector cable if you were much bigger than me at 5 foot 6 and 180 lbs. Each cable has a one sided clip near the air door connection that holds the cable cover in place, and a circle on the end of the cable to attach to the air door lever. The temp door attachment is in the passenger foot well in the corner between the console and glove box. The plastic knob is forked and you just squeeze it together and the control cable slips off. That one sided steel clip has teeth, and you have to carefully pull it back a good way to disengage from the plastic cable cover. But it would also be easy to bend it so far it doesn't work anymore or breaks entirely out of the plastic HVAC plenum box, then you'd have a big job on your hands. On the vent selector air door you have to move the cable fully in, which I believe was full defrost, to even be able to see the cable connection. Then you need to get down in the driver foot well and cram your head as far back between the area of the console and the gas pedal as you can, and look straight up with a flashlight. You'll be able to see a metal lever with the control cable on a metal knob, and it has a circular friction washer on the knob to hold the cable on. Getting that washer on and off in the space constrained area without losing it is the hardest part. I bent it pretty bad getting it off, but fortunately I was able to bend it back so I didn't have to wait on getting a new one. I didn't know to order it, and this one cent part didn't come with the control assembly that requires its removal, but comes with everything else under the sun that you probably don't need. To reinstall the control assembly, turn the vent control to defrost, and temp control to full cold (I'm pretty sure it was). Then fish the cables back into the general area they go, and connect the wiring. Lay the assembly down in front of the dash and reinstall the vent control cable first. After you have it connected, snap its cable in the one sided clip to secure it (this one is plastic and easier to do), and mount the assembly in the dash. Now install the temp control cable to the lever. Be sure to push the lever as far away from you as you can, and the dial to full cold. After popping the cable on the lever, again secure the cable in the one sided clip. If you start from hot/lever close to you, the dial will stop turning before it gets to full cold. I couldn't figure out why that was. I was ready to cuss the crap out of the Nissan HVAC engineer for the way they designed this, because some very simple and cheap changes would have made servicing infinitely easier, and could have prevented this failure too. Honestly in the end, it didn't go as bad as I was afraid when I first started the reinstall. But if you are a 220 lb big-shoulder big-hand guy, don't expect to even be able to do this.

Glad it was a simple and cheap fix. You have adventures ahead with the rest of the fleet.

The Yakima River Valley, a nice start to our day trip.

Yup, S is carb

Well, turns out the mile markers are absolutely no different, the vibration is the same as it was with the warns. At least I ruled out the hubs. Instead of swapping them back out, I’ll probably just sell the warns and keep the mile markers because they should be plenty strong enough for my purposes and the warns will fetch more used than the MMs cost me brand new. If anyone on here wants the warns, hit me up. Anyway, this experiment basically confirms that there is something else dragging on the CVs and keeping them turning, so the only options I have now are to fix the vibration itself (front shaft or CVs) or live with it. I might even just keep the hubs locked most of the time since the manual hubs aren’t saving much on gas or CV boot wear. I do still want to keep them for the other benefit of easy changing CVs as Raingoat mentioned Still need to figure out what happens when the vibration smooths out, so the camera is going on sometime this week and that should clear things up. If it turns out that the CVs stop rotating when the vibration smooths out, itll tell me that the front drivetrain is to blame but also raise more questions about how the Tcase actually works. Because again, I can’t see how he clutch plates could disconnect from the front shaft after 80mph if they aren’t built to ever fully disconnect at all. That screams “breakage” to me Id like to also mention that on a couple of trails I was getting a constant 4wd light popping up a couple times during slow speed maneuvers or tight turns and reversing in 4 low, but it went away after restarting the truck. This hasn’t happened before, so I’m worried that the clutch plates for the front shaft are being damaged and are getting less reliable engagement of the front than they used to, causing the light to pop up? If so, that would definitely be a reason to avoid manual hubs, but only time will tell. I don’t recall anyone else having any issues like that, but who knows? Bottom line is this stupid case is a complete mystery and I honestly wish I had a floor shifter instead, even though the auto feature is cool sometimes