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Because I am in the process of doing this myself you will need to do some modifications to your Water pump, the adjustment brackets for the alt & power steering and will need an adapter for the crank to reuse your VG30 crank pulley.. I got that all done by MR 510 so made it all pretty much a simple swap. I use the VG33 heads w/ the VG30 cams since had them.

It should be fairly straight forward. I know on the auto VG there is a thick bushing in the crank vs a pilot bearing. So you'll likely need to remove/swap that. The VQ is similar. Whenever I swap engines I always plan on using all the external components from the original engine unless they are damaged. Then you know you'll have the right parts.

Mine got to 265k before it succumbed to lifter death. But being a manual and liking ''spirited driving" and towing, I drove it hard . If you have clatter that lasts for more than a couple of seconds at cold start its probably coming for you. On these particular engines some of the other common causes of clatter like loose exhaust manifold and injector tick are unlikely, but still possible. Wow interesting on your cam sensor issue. I had to replace one once only. I also did one legitimate alternator replacement , the other was caused by a faulty scan tool. Two valve cover gasket replacements, one warrantied Replaced broken intake boot with filter system. Did a lift kit after my rear shocks needed replacement. Replaced broken rad clutch with electric fan system. Replaced belt idle pulley due to rattle. *forgot - replaced a starter And of course several brake pad and rotor replacements until I was more careful cleaning rotors on installation. I think that's it. Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

Four years later... Truck's at 190K now, still on the same brake setup, and still stops well. @TowndawgR50 still hasn't swapped his stuff, but now has a nicely repacked LSD to go with it. He's nearly there. Meanwhile, I'm nearing the start of a similar disc swap on my 98 Frontier 2wd...which includes swapping out the H190 axle (3.7, open) with an H233B (3.9, LSD). Axle housing and gears from a D21 V6 2WD, discs from a WD21, and a moderately-packed 105 ft-lb LSD of my own configuration.

Well, we're coming up on 2 years of having done this project. Glad to say everything has been holding up really well, despite not putting many miles on the truck annually. Odometer now reads 185,100, so I've only seen about 7,800 miles on them so far. At last check, pads and rotors were holding up just fine. Funny thing is that I took the truck to the nearby Nissan dealership earlier this year for the airbag recall, and their maintenance report said they were wearing low...jackasses probably had no clue what they were looking at. Still haven't looked into my ABS light, again noting that it came on several months after doing the swap. I deem them unrelated. In other news, the torch has been passed to @TowndawgR50 to also do the swap! I had been sitting on a spare set of discs for a long while now, and just shipped them up to him last week. Looking forward to seeing his take on the project and expanding this thread in the coming months.