pathfounder

I'd say you've definitely got an electrical problem, either the battery, the cables, the alternator, or the ECM. Start with the cheap and easy stuff first.

The crank pulley bolt is central inside the crank pulley. You can't miss it. Access it from the bottom by removing the dust shield. Remember there are two "Top Dead Center" occurrences on a 4-stroke engine. In this case however, turn it to TDC according to the notches on the pulley, and then pop the cap off and record what clock position the distributor rotor is pointing. Then, install the new one clocked the exact same way. You then fine-tune with the bolt holding it down (after following the procedure in the FSM with revving it up and down and all that). As for that bolt, do what you can. A crow's foot can probably get to it.

The owner's manual says "Type DEXRON ". ATF it is.

Follow the instructions in the owner's manual. The people that wrote it know what kind of oil to use.

Flowmasters are a chambered design and are usually really bad for interior noise because of this. The best mufflers, in my opinion, are turbo-style which is what cars come from the factory with. You can get ones that sound great without "rattling your brains out" as KTempleton put it.

I don't really see how this could improve gas mileage. Right after the air box is the throttle, a giant restrictor plate. Full throttle? Maybe, if the factory setup sucks enough.

Is it kind of a groaning noise? And is it only at full lock? If so, it's the power steering, and it's normal (unless it's head-turning loud).

A puller around the outside will trash the balancer almost for sure. If you are willing to replace the balancer, pull out all the stops on this project and cut it off with an angle grinder, or use the puller on the outside part, let it come off, and then use the puller on the inner part. This will probably be cheaper than paying a shop their labour rate for a task like this.

It will leak coolant out if it was mixing in the transmission cooler portion once the cooling lines are removed. I would replace the rad and run the transmission lines back to it, or get a separate cooler if you are worried about it happening again. Also, there is probably transmission fluid in the cooling system now too. I'd flush it real well and put new fluid in.

I fixed my p0325 code by replacing the knock sensor (in the proper location) and my engine's exhaust note changed noticeably, mileage improved, part throttle responsiveness improved, and the idle was smoother.

I don't get it. If the timing belt has the right number of teeth between the dots on the cams, and the right number of teeth between the driver side cam dot and the crank dot, then nothing else matters, the timing belt is on properly.

Did you do all of the rev up malarkey that you need to do in order to trigger the engine to run at 15 degrees of timing? It's something along the lines of over 3000 rpm for a minute, back down, or something. It's in the FSM. If you didn't do this, you probably measured nothing. Not sure why it would still be a tooth off if you followed our instructions. The cams and crank ALL need to follow the tooth count rule.

The reason that the fluid is so nice is because the last owner had a problem and tried to get by on new fluid to sell it. Forget the dealer, you can get another transmission for like 500 bucks from a wrecking yard and be on your way.

A weak ignition is usually at its worst when it's hot.

How was it a tooth off? Was the crank one tooth ahead of both cams, or behind, or was the right (your left when looking) one off from the left one? I'm just curious.

I wouldn't worry about which side is bad. My guess would be the cam that is driving the distributor is bad, and the other one might be off as well. Anyways, get down to the timing belt, turn the crank around until the cam dots are upward, and the crank dot is around 5 o'clock. Then, use the tooth counts to figure out what has to go where. You can put a dowel in the cyl #1 spark plug hole and watch it go up and then start to slow down and eventually go down. Then, you know you are near TDC. As mentioned by someone else, you shouldn't turn the cams in full rotations with the crank not turning because the valves might touch the piston faces. There's a way to get away with it, but let's not go there.

If the CV joints are rotating, and they bind, they will break. Sending drive through them while they bind will make them break more.

There's only one knock sensor, so it makes sense that you wouldn't get one of the other codes. The codes specific to the cylinders can only be triggered by another fault, like a bad injector or something else that is cylinder-specific to the ECU. The KS will only ever trigger engine-wide codes like p0300.

Badge engineering at its finest.

Don't use the outside of the crank pulley to turn the crankshaft. I did that with a strap wrench, and about 2 months later, the outer ring walked forward and the serpentine belt came off. You can either put the bolt back in along with something in the hole so that the bolt doesn't bottom out, or do what I did with my automatic, pop off the starter motor and turn the crank with a crowbar against the flex plate.

Replacing head liners can be VERY hard. On most cars, they are put in at the factory with the windshield not yet installed, because it's the only way to get it in without folding it and having it snap like a hard taco shell. You might get lucky with a Pathfinder and go out the tail gate. Honestly, I would just live with it or make repairs in-car and put it back up.

Engines love transmissions with lots of gears. You just need to find one that fits up to it and mates with the transfer case or drive shaft. It also needs to be the same length, or you need to cut the drive shaft, or have a new one made.

The lower crank mark should be around this clock position: Check this next picture out. Notice that the dimple is nowhere near correct. You can see scratch marks where I approximated where it should go. Tooth count is boss.

I hate to say this, but lining up the dimples is not really the proper way to do it. On my engine, the dimples themselves were actually pretty far off. It was literally NOT POSSIBLE to have all three aligned at once (it was off by half of a tooth). The proper way to do a timing belt is to line the cam(s), and crank very-nearly with the dimples, and then establish a proper tooth count between the marks on the gears of all three. The FSM has the tooth count in a table. If the only timing-related thing you touched during the job was the timing belt, and now the engine runs like crap, then I'm sorry but the timing belt was probably done wrong.

Running a lower RPM may not improve your mileage, which is what I assume the motivation is. To answer the actual question, I'm sure you could have custom gears cut.