Slartibartfast

That's crazy. How much pressure was in that thing? I can't tell if the outside shrunk or the inside bulged. Either way, good thing she found it when she didn't need it. I guess that's another point in favor of external tire carriers! Tough to miss a problem with your spare when it's right out in the open. (I say that... I remember taking the cover off the original spare on my '95 and finding the original spare inside, never used but with deep cracks in it.) I had a look at the spare in my dad's Audi a while ago, just to check it, and found that it was dead flat. Imagine my surprise when I aired it up and the damn thing unfolded. Some rocket surgeon designed a collapsible full-size tire to fit in a space-saver tire well instead of just making the tire well a little bigger. At least they included a spare at all, apparently a lot of cars don't.

That's the idea. If the valve is bent, the spring can't pull it up as far, leaving the rocker arm a little slack when the valve's closed... though now that I think about it, I'm not sure how much bend the hydraulic lifters might be able to fudge for. The compression test is a better idea. I think you can rule out the belt. If the lack of fire in #1 was because of incorrect cam timing, #3 and #5 wouldn't be hitting, either.

My '93 has a hatch, no idea if Nissan carried that along to the R51 though. The fuel system section of the manual's available here, might help give you an idea of what you're up against.

Start with the worst ones and strategize so you're not taking the same stuff apart twice. Stuff like the strut rods, sway bar bushings, and shocks can be gotten to pretty easily. If the front control arm bushings need doing, you're pulling a lot of stuff apart at once, so you might as do as much as you can while it's in pieces.

I'm running 5w30 maxlife in mine too, mostly because it was cheap. The engine seems to like it just fine, but it still leaks a little. I wouldn't expect any oil to work miracles on worn-out seals. Thicker oil probably won't change the leakage that much, and at some point you're just giving the oil pump a bad time.

Mid '93 they switched from square-tooth to round-tooth belt/sprockets, and increased the interval from 60k to 100k. It's been a while but I'm pretty sure 5523's writeup was what I used on my '93, plus the service manual for torque specs.

I had a look at EL-49 of the '95 manual and it looks like the rear wiper, washer, and glass hatch all run off the same 10A fuse (top row, second from the left). Maybe the seized motor wasn't pulling quite enough power to pop the fuse, but enough to melt the wires after a few hours? Check the fuse as well, make sure someone didn't put a bigger one in when the wiper started acting up.

My first thought is to just remove the glow plugs, but it seems like there's gotta be some way of locking out the injection pump. Hopefully someone who's actually seen a TD27 has a better idea than I do!

That little fuse holder was for the factory fog lights on mine IIRC.

I'm don't know how Ford did the diesel system, but I worked on one of their twin-tank gassers ('87 F150, 300-6) and theirs is not a fuel system I'd recommend. The parts are expensive, the fuel switching res is problematic, and when it has trouble it either blocks the system entirely or routes the fuel return to the wrong tank and overfills it. Ours was fouled due to bad gas (parked for a while), though the number of threads about problems with them on the Ford forums suggested that they fail perfectly well on their own. It also uses Ford's stupid quick connects and plastic lines, so adapting to anything else may be more difficult than it has a right to be. I think the '90s models changed a bit (two pumps instead of three) and the res may have improved, though you'd still have the dumb connectors to deal with. I've also seen an aftermarket electronic replacement for the switching res, but I don't remember those being cheap, either. Our IH Scout plow rig has twin tanks, but it's got a non-return carby system (no in-tank pumps and no return line), so it just has a small hard line going between the two tanks to equalize them. That only works if the tanks are at the same level, though. I saw a video of some guy (I think he was attempting the cannonball run) with an aux fuel cell, and an impressive bodge to make it work with the stock tank. He ran a line from the aux tank's pump to the main tank's filler neck. To control the pump, he used a defroster switch with a built-in timer. When the fuel level in the main tank dropped below a certain mark, he pressed the defrost switch, which powered the fuel pump for a set period of time, moving the right amount of fuel to top off the main tank. Red Green should be proud!

One of my idle control plugs is held in with a piece of .030 welding wire bent into the shape of the missing clip.

On a WD21? First you remove the little wire clip with a pick or knife point or something (kinda fiddly, be careful not to let it ping off into who knows where) and then the plug just pulls out.

TF-13 of the '03 manual (should be the same for the '02) shows a shift shaft seal where the linkage goes into the transfer, and how to replace it. No idea on the clutch, sorry.

Hmm. Yeah, that's not sounding good then. If you had plugs crossed up, it would be missing on two. I'd pull the valve cover and see if one of the rockers for #1 is loose when the valve should be closed.

Skimmed right over the part about it being an '02, sorry. Yeah, I think they ditched that design of master cylinder long before '02. Might be worth having someone else pump the brake while you check around the truck to see where brake fluid appears. I'm not seeing brake lines or hardware adjacent to the wet spot, but a pinhole in a line could be squirting it, or a leak could be following a wiring harness or cable or something from somewhere else. It's also entirely possible that the leak there is unrelated, so if you don't see anything dripping there, check around the rest of the brake system for anything obviously losing fluid.

I had a cam move quite a bit when I was trying to take the sprocket off. Wasn't holding the sprocket well enough and it turned a little, then it jumped as one or more of the cam lobes came around to where the springs spun them. Turned it back to where it was supposed to be, put it back together, ran fine. What's "can't right right in the #1 hole" mean? Is it back together and down a cylinder?

This might give you a better idea of what you're up against.

Sounds like an inhibitor issue, then. The inhibitor is meant to stop you from starting the car and having it bump a parked car, run over your foot, or roll backwards off of a four-post lift and out the door. Autos won't start unless they're in park or neutral, manuals won't start unless the clutch is pushed in. The switch for your inhibitor was on the auto trans you got rid of, so you need to rewire it to the switch on your new pedal box. You can see diagrams of both systems here (scroll down to page 31). The inhibitor system has a switch and a relay. The switch is easy enough to understand, the relay is just a switch that connects the starter to the ignition switch when power is applied to the coil inside. In the auto trans rigs, what you have (in terms of the wiring anyway), the inhibitor relay coil has constant ground to one side, and + is switched to the other by the inhibitor switch (on the trans). So if it's in park or neutral, current flows through the relay coil, the contacts come together, and the wire from the starter switch is connected to the starter motor. In manual rigs, what you're trying to replicate, the coil has constant + to one side and ground is switched to the other by the clutch switch. Clutch in, relay energized, switch and starter connected. I see a couple of options to get the inhibitor working with your swap. You could take the harness that used to go to the switch on the AT (white/red stripe and yellow), extend it back into the cab, and connect those to the two pins on the clutch switch. This wouldn't perfectly replicate the stock circuit, but the relay wouldn't care. With a little staring at the wiring diagrams in the manual, you could probably work out where those two inhibitor switch wires come from under the dash and save yourself some screwing around to bring them back in from underneath. The other option is to join the old inhibitor wires together wherever it's convenient, then cut the ground wire from the relay (there are two black wires, unhelpfully, and you only want the one for the relay coil--its the one on pin 2, if that helps) and run that to the clutch switch, then connect other pin of the clutch switch to any convenient body ground. This is closer to the original MT setup (not that the relay cares) and might save you some screwing around with the harness to the old switch, though I don't know if the ground on the relay would be any easier to bring in (didn't check where it's located). I'd probably go for the first option, especially if I could find those white/red stripe and yellow wires under the dash. At this point you may be thinking it would be easier to just bypass the inhibitor and be done with it. Unfortunately, the computer monitors this circuit, and will throw a P0705 code if it doesn't see the signal changing when expected (diagram on EC-214). There's also the obvious safety issue--even if you always remember to push the clutch/take it out of gear before starting it, your mechanic/valet/idiot friend or family member may not. That's not to say I didn't do exactly that on my dad's old F150 rather than replace the clutch switch when it wore out. For testing purposes... temporarily... you could just jumper those old AT inhibitor switch wires together to get it running, then come back and fix it the rest of the way when you get tired of looking at the check engine light. Hope this makes sense. Good luck!

Have someone press the brakes and watch the side of the master cylinder where the fittings go in. There's a little hole between two of the ports that's not plugged with anything (assuming it's a factory master). If the master's whupped, it'll puke a little fluid out of that hole. This ended up being the cause of brake fluid loss on my '95, and it was leaking on my '93 too, though not as badly. I can't quite tell what I'm looking at. Is that the shift linkage for the transfer? Seems light an odd place for brake fluid to end up.

I feel your pain, I broke both end vents on my dash a while ago and new ones are at least $60/each. Hoping to get lucky at the wreckers.

How do your vacuum lines look? Vac leaks could be part of your problem.

Does it crank but not start, or does it not crank at all?

Nah, broom technician. Make it sound like you had your own desk!

Pretty common for the rear suspension arm bushings to go bad and allow the rear axle to wiggle around, especially when you're getting on/off the gas. Commonly called the death wobble. There's no de dion tube in these, it's just a solid axle with a five-link (two uppers, two lowers, and the panhard to center it). Also take a look at your front end while you're under there. Make sure the strut rods are intact (though if one had snapped, I think you'd know long before you hit 65). If the bushings haven't been done, do them, those tend to look fine even when they're horribly wallered out.

If all your vac lines area accounted for, and the replacement plenum just has an extra nipple for something yours doesn't have, then yeah, just cap it.