Slartibartfast

Dragged two mature cottonwoods worth of logs down the driveway to get them out of the way. Biggest was maybe 30" diameter by 5' long. Incidentally, if anyone in north central Washington wants (and can haul) a bunch of cottonwood, hit me up!

If the computer knew everything, diagnosing engines would be easy! Is the timing advanced or retarded? If it's advanced too far, you might be hearing pinging rather than valve noise. No idea how coffee would've changed your timing but if nothing else is obviously wrong, you might try setting the timing back to 15° (with the engine warmed up) and see if that makes it happier.

The front end parts should work. The rear won't because the pickup has an entirely different rear suspension vs the Pathfinder. There are lots of lift threads on here that might help you find a cheaper option than a lift kit you can't use half of.

Start by finding a better place to put your coffee cup (I say, having balanced Coke cans on my intake quite a few times). People splash mud on these motors all the time without causing misfire issues, so a little coffee shouldn't have screwed it up like that. The weird timing is probably the ECU realizing there's something wrong and dialing back to play it safe. Running well at speed but poorly at idle sounds like a vacuum issue to me. Perhaps the cup hit something on its way down? Busted off a vac line? I'd also inspect your ignition components (cap/rotor/wires/plugs/coil) and anything else that was in the coffee's path for any obvious residue. I don't know if a glob of coffee creamer schmoo down a spark plug hole would be enough to cause a misfire, but I can't imagine it would help anything either.

Nice! Definitely keep a close eye on it moving forward but hopefully your flush was all it needed. What did you fill it with before?

That doesn't sound good. I've read about timing chain tensioner issues on the 4.0s so that's my guess as well.

Made and glued in nut plates so I could use bolts instead of the plastic crap Nissan came up with to hold the cowl on. One less rattle!

Yeah, it sounds like the actuator might be releasing the rear brakes and then sticking. Probably a good thing to look into. Good luck!

Ah, makes a lot more sense with a manual--I was assuming automatic. Sorry to hear they buried the switch so well.

... suddenly I've got this urge to check my rear wheel bearings. I've repacked my fronts but didn't even think to check the rears. Anyone repack theirs as preventative maintenance?

Mine's been doing something similar with the light coming on, though I haven't had an actual issue crop up under braking. BR-34 in the service manual has a procedure where you ground one pin on the ABS diagnosis plug (one of the empty plugs that flops around behind the dash) and it flashes the light to tell you what it thinks is wrong. I've been meaning to do this on mine, but of course the damn thing only crops up when I don't have time to check it, then refuses to come on when I've got the instructions at hand. If it comes on more when it's wet out, though, I'd suspect the connector/wiring more than the internals. Or possibly the sensor on the rear diff, or its connector/wiring. Hopefully the code points you in the right direction.

Damn, you're everywhere!

Odd that it suggests a thicker wire--like you said I'd expect that connection to be for sensing rather than supplying power. If you have an ammeter, you could rig everything up in the back of the truck with jumper leads, hit the brakes, and see what the actual load on that wire is to get some idea for what size of wire you need. But rather than dig into the cruise control harness or the SMJ, why not just run it to the brake switch itself? It's not that far away and unless the R50 hid it better than the WD21 did, it shouldn't be that hard to get to. Provided you do the splice properly (just say no to suitcase connectors), and the brake controller doesn't burn up and short out, you shouldn't have an issue with the circuit you're tapping into. That said, if I had to choose between no ABS and the cruise control making the engine fight the brakes, I'd take no ABS any day of the week!

I cut and welded some scrap rod into an F shape. Long part was the handle, short parts fit into the sprocket and hold it still. Worked great, let me pull the sprockets off to do the camshaft seals, and held the sprockets while reinstalled and torqued the bolts. Also helped for positioning the sprockets when I put the belt back on. If you don't have a welder, a good piece of strap steel with a couple holes and long-ish bolts through them should do the same job.

The regulator's cheaper than that. You just buy an 8v regulator IC (dirt cheap) and wire it into the place of the stock regulator. Here's a discussion of the regulator and here's a guy showing how to mount a generic IC in the dash of a Pulsar or something. There's probably a dedicated how-to for doing this on a D21 or WD21 dash if you look around enough.

Huh, never heard of a green strobe on a vehicle. Amazing what you can find in the bin. Mine did its stalling-at-idle routine again. Not misfiring, just acting like it wants to idle at 50 rpm for some reason. As usual, it cleared up before I could track it down, so I guess I'll figure it out later. You know what doesn't clear up? The chunks of insulation missing from one of my spark plug wires thanks to some damn rodent or another. Oh, well. The NGK wire is blue silicone. Permatex Ultra Blue is blue silicone. My path forward is clear. Anyone rigged one of those electrocuter mousetraps to a vehicle battery? Couldn't be that hard to make it automatic. It just needs a little flipper to clear the trap after each kill and a relay to re-arm it. Of course, I'd probably come out to a flat battery and a pile of dead chipmunks, but at this point, I would be very much okay with that.

The '95 service manual says the wire's yellow with a red stripe. That same wire on my '93 is brown with a red stripe, so that's odd. It's got a sort of rubber sheath around it almost to the plug (for protection I guess) and the stock end is a little plastic connector with some kind of rubber growth on it--a spade terminal would do the job without issue. +1 on digging into the harness, it should still be in there even if somebody lopped off the end for some reason.

Don't see why not, though it's probably a similar amount of work vs fixing the stock one. The sender for the gauge in the dash is on the upper coolant neck. There are two sensors there, one with a yellow two-wire plug and one with a single connection, the single one's for the stock gauge. If your mechanical one will screw into the same hole (or you can find/make an adapter), that might be the easiest place to tap in.

That's a question for the service manual--I don't even remember what fuse it's on in my WD21.

Dash light failure on my '93 turned out to be the dimmer switch being gummed up inside to the point where it wasn't sending power to the bulbs. I'd start by unhooking that switch and testing to see if there's power going to it, and power going to the dash light circuit--or just jumper past the dimmer and see if that makes the dash lights come on. The service manual should have the wire colors you need to track down.

The single dimples have matching spots on the timing cover that are almost close enough to time by--but you still want to count teeth rather than trusting that. And yes, you can use that nut. I recommend using a breaker bar, solid wrench, or similar, instead of a ratchet, so you're in full control of the cam and it can't jump forward on you.

Yeah, you can just move the crank and cams with a socket. When I did my TB, I replaced the cam seals, and ended up making an F-shaped tool to hold the cam sprockets in place while I loosened and re-torqued the bolts. This tool turned out to be great for lining up the marks as well.

Bizarre. Good luck with the drive shaft shop, hopefully it's a cheap fix!

Yep, there's just the one sensor. The service manual calls it the camshaft position sensor (which makes sense, seeing as how the dizzy is geared off the camshaft). There is a code for this sensor (11, "Camshaft Position Sensor Circuit"), but the ECU only throws that code if "Either the 1° or 120° signal is not entered for the first few seconds during engine cranking" or "Either 1° or 120° signal is not input often enough while the engine speed is higher than the specified RPM". So, if the sensor doesn't say anything at all, or keeps missing a beat, it'll code. Other than that, the ECU will believe just about anything the sensor throws at it, and adjust the fuel injection and spark timing accordingly. I'd throw a timing light on it when it's acting up and see if the marks jump all over the place. I've heard of guys replacing just the sensor and being fine, but I've also heard that the bushings in the distributor itself can fail so it doesn't spin freely or the bushing dust gets into the sensor wheel or something. I haven't dealt with this issue on mine so that's about all I know about it.

This guy put a heavily built 3.3 (bored out to 3.4) in his rig with a TBI. Seemed to work out alright for him. I assume someone here has manual-swapped an R50 and could tell you how to keep the 3.3 EFI happy without the auto trans, if you want to go with the newer EFI.