Slartibartfast

Annoyingly, I just stumbled across the Grant #3560 kit, on Rockauto of all places. Wholesaler closeout, so if you need one, grab one. Wish I'd seen that earlier! Looks the same as the kit I ended up with.

Clean rig! I haven't found a diagram showing the flares. I suspect they were installed at the port, or maybe the dealer, not least because the bolt heads are 3/8". It's been a minute since I had mine off, but I think I remember enough to give you a rough idea. The mudflaps with the cones go on the rears. The round-head screws go through the curved line of holes in the flaps. The front flares are meant to clip to a trim strip under the front bumper, so you should be able to identify them pretty easily by having the spot for the clip. The plastic clips go along the tops of the arches, inside the wheel well, over where the fender tabs meet the flares. The rounded bit faces the fender, on the top side. I assume they're meant to suck the flare tight against the fender as the bolt is tightened. That said, you may have some trouble fitting those to a two-door. The flares changed mid '92, I assume to match the square bumpers changing to the rounded ones, and those look like the later ones. I ran into this when I bought a rear flare off a '92 that didn't fit my '95, because the tabs along the top of the wheel arch were in different places. (I haven't tried interchanging the front flares, no idea if they changed the bolt pattern there as well.) The clips were different, too. Hinged rather than flexible IIRC. The shape of the arches should be the same AFAIK, so even if the tabs are wrong, I'll bet you could come up with something to make those work. Maybe new tabs glued to the flares to match your fenders, if you can work out what type of plastic it is/what kind of glue it likes. If you don't have the trim under the front bumper to clip the front flares to, you could just round the leading edges with tin snips so they don't look like they're missing something. I did that to mine after a deer strike mangled that fussy trim piece, and I couldn't be arsed to try and straighten it back out again. I'll try and remember to take some pictures of mine later. PM me if it's been a few days, things tend to fall off my back burner.

I would check the plug wires, make sure nothing's been chewing on them. If nothing jumps out, pull one wire at a time (carefully, easy to shock yourself). If it makes the engine run worse, put it back. If not, then you know which cylinder is misfiring. Then it's a question of spark, fuel, or compression. Check that you've got spark at the plug end of the wire, check that the plug is good, check the resistance on the injector, and if none of that shows the issue, do a compression test. I had this happen recently on mine. Checked resistance on the injectors and found that the injector on the misfiring cylinder was well out of spec. It somehow fixed itself when it cooled off so I've been ignoring it for now, but I imagine it'll remember that it's dead sooner or later.

Ah, yeah, that sounds like it's good and dead then. Funny you mention rodents. I had a packrat on top of my gas tank the other day. Had this weird noise like fuel was sloshing, when the truck wasn't moving. I'm not sure what the little guy was chewing on or kicking or what, but it led me right to him. Naturally he also crapped all over the intake manifold.

Yeah, WD21 PS uses ATF too. This made me assume that ATF was good enough to top up the PSF res on my friend's van, which led to one of the more puzzling things I've seen a vehicle do. Over the next couple of hours, it pissed all the ATF I'd added past the pitman shaft seal, while somehow holding onto the old burned GM PSF, or at least enough of it that we didn't lose power steering or brakes. Maybe PSF has slightly larger molecules than ATF. Maybe the fluid was 90% stop leak by that point. Or maybe that van ran on spite more than it ran on gasoline. If the fuel pump is priming enough for that initial startup, that suggests it's not seized. It just can't keep up, which is weird. Weak pump would make sense. I'd be tempted to swap out the rubber lines on the pressure side, in case one is falling apart and blocking itself off somehow. I assume you've thrown a filter at it already. Fronty looks clean! Too bad there's no access hatch for the fuel pump like there is on the WD21/R50.

Hopefully the new fittings do the trick and you can escape it for a while! A friend of mine feels the same way about power steering fluid, after going multiple rounds with a dying hydroboost system in a van. For me, it's brake fluid. Weird issue on the Fronty. Have you confirmed that the computer still has power when you let off the key? Would be a weird way for the switch to fail, but I'm reminded of older points/condenser systems that'll do that if the ballast resistor lets go. Only has spark while cranking.

Figures they'd find a way to overcomplicate the valve covers, then screw up the documentation. Good work wading through it!

Looks like the rear bumper is hanging down in the second picture. Take a look at that and see what's broken. I'm guessing someone backed into something. Might just pop back on, might have broken clips? I don't know how those attach. New York is worrying. My '95 spent the first part of its life in New York. The body looked alright, but the frame was rotted through, and every bolt under it was a fight. Hopefully this one was looked after while it was in the US, and the owner didn't go to all that trouble to ship a rustbucket across the pond. Definitely check underneath, especially the strut towers, like Hawairish said. This PDF shows where they like to rot, and also the band-aid that Nissan slapped on that bullet wound. If I looked under and found evidence of that band-aid, I would treat it the same as a giant rust hole, and back away slowly. I've bought from Amayama and Partsouq. I assume they'd ship to Europe, don't know that for sure though.

Unless the tires block the end links, you may not even need to take the wheels off. When I did my front swaybar bushings, I think the only thing I used the jack for was trying to line up the ends of the bar to where I could get the end links put together. I remember fighting that part for a while. If you do take the wheels off, make sure everything's chocked and on stands when you're working on it, especially while you're yanking/jacking on stuff trying to get the end links to line up.

I'm guessing OE is either this or this, but check the diagrams against your pedal assembly to see if I'm looking in the right place. I ordered these when I did mine. I remember them fighting me a bit, but I haven't had trouble with them since. The description says they fit '84-'17, so I guess Nissan held onto this stupid design for a while! And yeah, sounds like a lot of people use coins or similar. There's probably a plastic trim clip that would work just as well. Or one of those stick-on felt pad feet for furniture.

Sway bars shouldn't screw up the alignment, if that's all you're doing!

Rat Trap's steering wheel was starting to get gross. Hand sweat, sun damage, and the previous owner's lung darts had left the outer rim cracked, turning brown, and starting to smell. Then I remembered that aftermarket steering wheels are a thing. Maybe the minitruckers are onto something, I thought. I figured I'd keep things simple by going with a wheel and a column adapter from the same company. Grant's website showed an adapter kit for these trucks, #3560, so that was a good start. I had a look through their catalog and decided on their #1160. Simple, black on black, leather grip. No rainbow chrome, no trucker babes, no flames. http://www.grantproducts.com/images/product-images/lg/1160.jpg Summit had it well below list price, so I ordered it from there. They didn't have the column adapter, and Grant's website's checkout didn't work, so I ordered that from elsewhere. The folks I ordered the column adapter from emailed me the next day to say that they didn't actually have one. I checked around, and found a bunch of other retailers listing them as discontinued or out of stock. The few who claimed to have them either didn't get back to me or confirmed that they couldn't get them either. Grant's site also listed a fancy billet adapter, #5560, but I couldn't find one of those, either. There are a bunch of cheap D21 column adapters on eBay. They're all drilled for six-bolt wheels. And the #1160 wheel I had ordered, which by this point was already in the mail, is five-bolt. Nissan Nut's page suggested that Grant #3596 would fit instead. I found one on eBay. It came in an "American Products Company" box. (Made in Taiwan, naturally.) It doesn't say Grant on it anywhere, but it looks just like the Grant kits, the splines are correct, and the three-bolt pattern matches the spacer. Is it a knockoff? Is this Grant's own off-brand? It's what I could get. The wheel came with a spacer. The spacer adapts between Grant's three-on-1.75" pattern (which the column adapter uses, as do some of their simpler wheels) to their five-on-2.75" pattern, which their "Signature Series" wheels (including this one) use. It's made from welded steel, and it feels sturdy. Unfortunately, it spaced the wheel too far back, to where I had to reach for the lights and wipers. It's also stuffed into a rubber sleeve, which doesn't fit it very well. Flipping it around doesn't help, either. Either it's so loose at the front that you can see the metal part of the spacer through the wheel, or it's so loose at the back that you can get your finger in between them. And it's tight enough in the middle that it gets stretched into a polygon by the spokes of the spacer. I suspect its primary function was to sell the billet adapter kits. Naked spacer in the middle, misshapen rubber thing on the right. On the left is the Forever Sharp MG15-B billet spacer that I used instead. It's half an inch shorter, which fixed the gap to the stalks, and it looks way better than the floppy rubber turtleneck. It actually looks quite nice! It also solved a dumb problem with the column adapter, which is that you need a special three-bolt puller to remove it. The Forever Sharp spacer is drilled for both 5 on 2.75" and 6 on 2.75", so you can bolt a standard wheel puller across two of the six-pattern holes to pop the hub assembly off the splines. (The holes are threaded #10-32, same as the Grant spacer.) Either spacer goes in between the column adapter and the nut. Unfortunately this leaves the end of the steering shaft slightly short of the end of the nut. I don't think it's going anywhere, but, yeah, I don't love that. I have yet to decide if it bothers me enough to take it back apart and do something about it, but I'm leaning towards swapping that nut for one that doesn't have a washer attached to it. The turn signal cancel mechanism fought me a little bit. The APC column adapter has two holes for roll pins, which take the place of the tabs on the back of the stock wheel. The pins aren't long enough to hit the cancel lever on the switch if you push them in all the way, which I found out the hard way. The second time, I installed them about a quarter inch into the column adapter. That sorta got them working, but, strangely, only in one direction. I figured the pins were just a little too close to the center, so they weren't engaging the cancel lever properly. To fix this, I removed the turn signal stalk (as pictured below), stuck a 1/4" extension in through that hole there, and used that as a punch to gently persuade the pins outwards a little. This might not be the right way to do it, but the signals cancel perfectly now. Actually, they cancel a little better than they did with the stock wheel. Round and square dash have different turn signal cancel mechanisms. Square dash has a single cancel lever on the switch, and two tabs on the back of the wheel, spaced about 120* apart from each other. Round dash has two separate cancel levers on the switch, with a space between them, so Nissan moved the tabs on the wheel out to 180* to account for that space. (Square dash wheel on top, round on bottom.) The APC hub has the 180* spacing of the round-dash, but my truck is square-dash, so the steering wheel has to turn 90* for the pins to hit the cancel lever (I think stock is about 60). I thought the factory setup was a bit trigger-happy, so I consider this an improvement. That rounded sheet metal cover came with the column adapter, and it doesn't cover it very well. It's got a pretty big gap to the clamshell. My clamshell is a redneck abomination of my own devising, so I can't say for sure that it wouldn't match the original clamshell a little better, but I know the stock wheel was not gapped out that far. Maybe the correct kit comes with a longer cover? I'll probably make up a new one that actually fits at some point, but today is not that day. I've read some complaints about the horn buttons on Grant's 3-bolt wheels. This wheel doesn't use that design. The five-bolt wheels use a self-contained horn button, which friction-fits into the trim ring. It's got two spade terminals on the back for the wires. One wire comes from the column adapter (which uses a piece of circuit board for the slip ring), and the other goes to a ring terminal, which I put under one of the three bolts holding the spacer to the column adapter. This system works just fine with the factory horn contact on the column, and I didn't have to modify or adjust anything to get it working properly. Sadly they don't have any amusing replacement horn buttons, or even a Nissan one. Just domestic brands, their own name, blank, or "4x4," in case you need reminding of that sort of thing. I've driven around a bit since installing the new wheel. The leather grip feels nice, and it doesn't have a rancid mixture of hand sweat and lung dart residue festering inside of it, which is a welcome change. The smaller diameter clears my knees better, but it's not so small that I feel like I stole the wheel off the riding mower. And I like the look--it looks upgraded, without looking like I've mistaken Rat Trap for a racecar. That said, the fit and finish could be better. There's a little glue residue on the spokes, the leather wrap ends closer to the spoke slot on one side than the other, and that one out-of-place white stitch at the bottom bugs me a little. The horn trim ring has a garf under the paint, and came with some paint scratched off around one of the screw holes--screw holes which mysteriously don't exist in Grant's product picture. The picture conveniently omits the spacer with the can koozy around it, too. So, yeah. This turned out to be a bit more of a can of worms than I had hoped, and if I was going to do it all over again, I don't know that I'd do all the same things. Now that it's all said and done, though, I like it, and it's staying. One last thing: I did reach out to Grant's customer support about the adapter. Grant's tech support guy confirmed that the #3560 kit was out of stock, but said he'd managed to track one down. (Naturally I had already ordered the other kit by the time I got that email.) So if you need a Grant column adapter, try their customer support--they may be able to hook you up.

Check your fan clutch.

I was offered eight or nine hundred to put a clutch in an old Yota a few years back. I was surprised too, but I'm sure it was less than a proper mechanic had quoted him to do the job. Especially if the mechanic had seen the truck!

This one? Looks like the OP's site is down, so that's a Dropbox link.

2001 is an R50. The WD21 ended in '95 in the US. The question is whether you've got the VG33 (3.3l) or VQ35 (3.5l). Looks like there are two switches on the brake pedal. One for the brake lights, one for the cruise control (which Nissan calls ASCD for some reason). If the R50 pedal assembly is built like the WD21, there's a little rubber plug that bumps against the end of the switch, until it cracks and falls out, and causes the switch to think the brakes are always pressed. Check for that before assuming it's the switch. There's a troubleshooting section for the cruise control in the EL section of the service manual, which you can download for free from Nicoclub. There's an '01 and an '01.5 manual, depending on whether you've got a VG or a VQ. Cutting the wires at the pumps will not do what you want it to. The front pump is ground-switched (one side of the motor gets fused power, the other side runs through the switch, then to ground), so grounding it at the pump would cause it to run constantly. The two pumps do not share a fuse with each other, though they do share fuses with their respective wiper motors--so if the wipers work, then you know the fuses are OK. If the front wipers work, then you know the ground points for the pumps are OK, because those circuits share the same two ground points. I would check the pumps first. Unplug them, see if the plugs are corroded, see you've got power and ground at the plugs (while someone holds the washer button). Power the pumps directly with jumpers or a drill battery to see if they go. I would not be surprised if the pumps were seized up, especially if the truck sat for a while (or if the previous owner just didn't use them). "Wiper and washer" (also in the EL section) has the circuit diagrams for the pumps and wipers. Those diagrams and a voltmeter should be enough to track down where the problem is.

Never fun when it goes back together and still doesn't work. I'm guessing you've got a cracked coolant line or a loose block drain or something up above the pan, and it's running down. I don't know the VQ, so I don't know what the most likely culprit would be, but I'd start the search with anything coolant-related that you've touched recently, that's above where you're seeing the drips. Clean/dry the area if you're having a hard time seeing what's new and what isn't. But if it's a steady drip, it should show itself pretty quick, unless it's right proper buried. The no-start and clicking really does sound like the battery to me. If it's resting at 11.5, then it's right proper flat. Are you sure the other battery is good? A clapped battery can show good voltage, but fall on its face when loaded. Do you have a jumper pack, or another vehicle that you can jump it from? While you're in there, make sure your terminals are tight and clean, and check that you didn't remove an engine ground and forget to put it back on.

The '90 manual is a free download from cardiagn.com. Most of it is the same as the '94/'95 manual on Nico, but there are enough stupid little differences to bother getting the right one.

Well that's easy, then!

Is the wiper switch on? That also locks out the popper. If there's nothing obvious, check at the actuator, see if it's missing power, or if it's missing ground, to see which side of the circuit needs chasing. If it's missing power, verify +12v on the light green wire at the switch, verify that the switch works, verify light green/red at the wiper switch has power when the switch is pressed, verify power's getting through the wiper switch to green, and so on, back to the actuator. If it's missing ground, there's much less on that side of the circuit. Just the wiper motor interlock and a couple of body grounds. The whole diagram's on BF-11 of the '90 manual, have a look at that as you're going through it so you can see what connects where.

Oddly the rear window hatch popper isn't on a fuse, it's on a circuit breaker. It shares that breaker with the ignition relay, so if that was out, you'd have bigger issues. The wiper motor has to be present (and in the correct position) for the hatch popper to work. There's a switch in the wiper motor that prevents you from opening the window when the wiper is in the way. It seems to only hit that switch every other swipe for some reason, so just because the wiper is down doesn't mean it's "home." I've run into this a few times on mine (the wiper's down but the glass won't pop), and I've learned to turn off the wiper, let if find "home," and then turn off the ignition. Of course that doesn't help you now. The wiring diagram for the hatch popper is in the BF section, for some reason. Looks like you could just jumper from green/white to black at the wiper motor plug to bypass the wiper position switch.

I'm a little confused on which fuse you're popping. One pops after three seconds, the other pops when the wiper returns? Or is it the same fuse? Looks like the rear wiper fuse should be second from the left, top row. EL-69 of the '90 manual shows the rear wiper wiring. ('95 had the switch on the stalk, so the '95 diagram is different.) You've already checked the first thing I'd check. At this point I'd pull the driver's side cargo area trim panel and see if there's anything obviously wrong with the wiring, the wiper amp, or the relay, and pull the trim on the hatch and check the wiring for the motor and its switches. Could be the hatch switch for the dome light was acting up as they do and someone cut the wrong wire, or maybe someone got really lost while installing a trailer harness. If nothing jumps out, I'd unplug the motor and see if it still pops the fuse.

Sounds like a conrod planning a vacation. The VQ is known for burning oil, so yeah, check the oil level first. Hopefully it's not that. If it's got oil, and the oil pressure light isn't on, check the aircon pump. Aircon off, blower off, see if the awful noise suddenly stops.

Figures it's different from US spec. I looked up the wiring for a WD21, which has solid-color wires, but naturally not the same solid colors. Good to hear you figured it out in the end. And yes, not surprising that the trans computer ain't happy with something else controlling the gearbox.

According to AT-40 of the '96 manual, solenoid A is blue with a white stripe, B is blue/red, torque converter clutch is green/orange, overrun clutch solenoid is blue/black, line pressure solenoid is green/yellow. If your wire colors don't line up with this, drop the pan and follow the wires. AT-34 shows which solenoid is which on the valve body. All solenoids are switched on the + side. These folks have a rail shifter for the RE4R01A. Not sure if you're looking for a kit or rolling your own, but it might help to see how they've done it.