TahoeRunner

Thanks for all the "likes" I hope to keep it this nice and preserve it although I can't guarantee it won't pick up some desert pin stripes along the way! I do need to get the windows tinted pretty bad. This is the first car i've ever had with non-tinted windows for more than a couple of days, so it feels naked! Need to get around to doing that...

I didn't know about B12. My dad suggested the seafoam and so I researched it on here and seemed like quite a few people used it.

I've heard that the alternator on its way out can cause the electronics to wig out before the alternator just quits charging. Especially if the voltage regulator in the alternator is failing it could be allowing surges and dips in the voltage coming out. I'm sure others on here are more familiar with it, but I would have the alternator checked to start.

Hey what brush guard do you have on your red XE? I kind of like it.

Yeah I wish I would have done a video. I didn't think about about doing a video until I was in the middle of it and it was too late. I honestly didn't realize how much it was going to smoke! And the truck is clean now, but I plan on getting it dirty too and hitting the trails. I'm not going to take it off road till I swap the rest of the fluids though and fix the broken exhaust hanger. But stock, this thing should do pretty good and i'm excited to see what it can do. When I was younger I had an 04 Frontier Crew Cab Long Bed and even though it had a mile long wheelbase and was bone stock and it did awesome off-road. It would claw out of ravines it has not business making it out of!

Haha. Yeah I haven't done the engine yet. Its actually not that dirty in there, but I need to give it a good detail. That will come on another weekend.

Oh and I forgot to add. The seafoam and the new fuel filter did wonders. My expectations were pretty low with only 153 hp, but I didn't realize how down on power the truck was. On my drive to work today, I can easily climb this one little hill in 5th gear that usually required a downshift to maintain 50 mph and I can easily start off in 2nd gear. Its not fast, but the engine revs much freer than it was and it's got some decent pull and much better driveability. I'm thinking the fuel filter was pretty clogged before as I was getting a slight stumble at idle when cold if I didn't let the fuel pump cycle a couple of seconds first. Now it starts right up no problem!

Well I finally had good weather and free time come on the same weekend and got to spend some time with Sarge since purchasing him. First things on the list were to just do an oil change, change the fuel filter, new wiper blades and air filter. Also I needed to give the outside a good bath and hose out the frame rails. I'd already detailed the interior a couple of weeks ago so it's good to go. One of the things I decided to try after a suggestion by my dad and digging around here was to try the Seafoam treatment. So here's how it went down. I was very leary about doing the treatment so I read just about every thread on here that talked about it and went directly to the seafoam website and followed their directions to the letter. The oil was pretty clean still as the truck had just hit 3,000 miles since the previous owner had the oil changed, but with so little miles his wife drove, the oil was changed almost 12 months ago. So I dumped 2/3 of the can of seafoam into the crankcase, and then started the motor letting it run for about 5 min. Then I removed the brake booster hose and then slowly poured in the other 1/3 of the can into the vac hose being sure not to let the motor die. It stumbled and belched smoke as I poured it in but I kept going. After the can was all poured in, I shut the motor off for 5 min and then restarted it and started revving the motor up and down. HOLY CRAP!!!! My neighbor came out and it looked like our couldesac was on fire! I reassured him I was just doing a liquid tune-up. So for about 5 min the exhaust belched blue, black, and white smoke as I revved the motor. Then as the smoke tapered off I took it for a spin around the block and by the time I got back, no more smoke. All good there. Then I went to drain the oil and it came out abosolutely midnight pitch black. So I let it drain for a good long time. While doing that, I swapped the fuel filter real quick. That fuel filter could have been very well the original. Not sure though. After the oil was all drained, swapped the oil filter, poured in the measily 3.8 qts of high mileage synthetic blend and then gave him a bath. When I had checked the truck originally for rust I could tell the frame rails were full of dirt, but amazingly there was no rust, or if there was it was ever so slight. My guess is that the truck didn't spend enough time in wet conditions to keep the dirt saturated. So I flushed the rails out for a good 2-3 minutes on each side, in both directions until the water came pouring out clear. Lets just say I ended up with a lot of mud in the driveway! Detailed the outside, scrubbed the tires and the spare tire cover and this is how he turned out. I love how original the truck is. Unless I have money to blow and something else to drive, I think i'm gonna keep him stock except for a set of tint on the windows.

My commute is on a 4 lane road for about 11 miles each way where I cruise between 45 & 50 most of the way but it has lights all along it and I maybe end up stopping and starting about 3 times on average in that 11 miles. I also have a 5 speed and drive it effeciently so that probably helps. If I notice the light a 1/8 mile up the road is red, I pop it in neutral and coast there instead of slamming on the brakes at the last minute.

Wow, I'm doing pretty good I guess. I'm getting a solid 21 mpg. 4 tanks down since I bought Sarge and everyone has been over 20 mpg. I know that something being wrong can kill the gas mileage, can it work the other way? haha. I think my commute just lets the truck run in a real sweet spot. Only explanation I can think of.

Thanks for the tips. I have them set for 30 and the handling feels floatier and sloppier (go figure) than before. The truck has LT tires on it which is so overkill so I might bump up the psi 2-3. We'll see how it goes. One thing I noticed is that lowering the PSI seemed to help my speedometer be more accurate, which the day I bought it and brought it home I noticed on the freeway it was 5mph too slow. So either my speedo is more accurate because the tires are inflated so much to be riding on the center ridge, or traffic yesterday was flowing a lot faster than usual everywhere. Might have to get my wife to follow me somewhere this weekend to verify.

^^yeah, what he said.^^

Wow sounds like a few of the scenes from Black Hawk Down.... nothing but cover fire!

So last night I was in the garage digging around in my toolbox for something and found one of our tire pressure guages and thought, oh man I haven't checked the tire pressure on Sarge yet since I bought him almost a month ago. I had thought the other day to check the tire pressure just to be sure since the previous owner had the tires rotated and balanced at Costco (where he bought them) a few days before I bought it and it would let me know if any of the tires were leaking. Got out the trusty guage and almost leaped in the air! All 4 were inflated to 48 psi!!! the max listed on the sidewall! I can't tell you how many times I've had to correct people that if you are running stock tire size you should be inflating to what's on the inside of the door, but I was shocked that he just had it in for a rotation and they adjusted the pressure that high. The sad thing is, this isn't the first time I've seen this happen from a tire place that's going off the sidewall label on the tire and not the placard in the door. They must have had some new guy in there doing rotations or something. So I checked the door and saw that it only requires 26 psi! I don't think i've ever had a car that recommends less than 30 psi before. So that leads me to my question. I know most of you run oversize tires but for any still stock or back when you were stock, what psi did you run your tires at? This might explain why its been getting such good gas mileage because the tires were running on their tippy toes. Last night I let them down to 30 psi for now. Do any of you run higher psi, lower? notice differences? On my drive to work this morning it definitely took the edge off the ride! I thought it was awfully rough riding, even for a mid 90's SUV but now its not quite as jumpy and definitely less squirelly.

Yeah I actually track the mileage on our cars through and app on my phone and backed up on a spreadsheet. You'll probably want to get a little more data going for a better picture. Its a good thing to track with each fill-up because a drop in fuel economy from your normal trend is a good indication of either maintence needed or a need of a repair coming real soon.

I can't imagine its the timing belt but it could be. It shouldn't be the water pump though. It was done about 10k miles ago with the timing belt. I'll have to try the accessory belts first and see.

Well I didn't have as much time this weekend as I was hoping so I got nothing done on Sarge. I did have a few minutes thought to slide under and have a look around. So I do have a broken exhaust hanger. Its the one for the muffler, the little rubber piece is split in two and the exhaust is hanging down an inch or so and just barely above the frame cross member. So that's probably the banging around i'm hearing. I'm gonna try and pick one of up from NAPA today if they have one and swap it this week.

Hi everyone, Loving the pathfinder and its fitting in with the family nicely. We've been having some nicer weather so I think i'm going to be doing the fluids here in the next few weeks. My wife is diggin it and we are really enjoying having a manual tranny again, even though this one is a little picky. I found that you can't rush it into 2nd gear most of the time so you have to pause for a split second for the change to be a little smoother. I've actually been getting great gas mileage in it too. I drive 11 miles to work each way non-highway and other running around and my first two tanks have been 20.2 and 20.7 mpg so the motor must be running pretty well. I have noticed a few things and have been searching around the forums and some stuff I've found on and some I haven't so I thought I'd get your thoughts. 1. I think I have one or two broken exhaust hangers thanks to some searching on the forums. When I hit sharp bumps I get some banging around under the driver's floor board and when I start the engine I get the same "banging" sound underneath the truck. It would make sense if its the exhaust slaping around when ever the motor moves a bit or if I hit bumps. I'm going to crawl under the truck this weekend and take a look. 2. There seems to be a fuel smell when the engine is cold and I only smell it if it idles in place for a minute or two. I tightened all the fittings of the usual fuel hoses that you guys mention and that seemed to help some, but I think there is a very small leak at the hose going into the fuel filter. By the way the fuel filter looks like it might be original or very very old so that is definitely getting swapped this weekend. The fuel leak must be very slight though, otherwise my gas mileage would suffer if a lot of fuel wasn't making it to the engine. 3. Yesterday was the first nice day that I actually was able to drive with the windows down all the way home. I noticed in our neighborhood that the engine is kind of whiny. Not sure if the engine has a natural whine to it but the best way to describe is that its sounds like a supercharger with a little bit of bad power steering pump. The belts all look pretty new from what I could tell and its not high pitched. When I got home, I popped the hood and revved the motor a couple of times and its noticeable but wouldn't call it loud. I found a few things on the forum about the TBelt being too tight or any of the other belts. It could be a bad alternator too I guess. Any thoughts? 4. The only other "interesting" thing I noticed is that when I start it in the morning and the motor is real cold, I get a whistleing noise from the motor. It usually fades off within 20 seconds, and the colder the longer it lasts. didn't find anything on that one. I noticed one of the later repair tickets from the previous owner, that he complained of a whistling noise when cold and the shop replaced his injector seals. So it either didn't fix it or it came back. Other than that, its been doing great and just needs a bath finally but time has been scarce!

Trying not to thread jack, but can you just simply swap the VG33 heads onto the vg30 block?

Wow, did you smell the fuel all the time or just when the car is running? When Sarge is parked in the garage overnight there is no fuel smell at all. Just when I start it up cold and runs for a few minutes.

Mine is coming from the engine bay when cold because the fuel smell is immediately noticeable from the heater if its on and drawing outside air and the pathy is sitting in place. I see you are in Nevada, where at?

Yeah I'll have to look into the intake maybe down the road. The motor runs great and pulls strong so not sure if I need to reset the ECU but maybe I'll try it to see if it does anything. I think its more of an issue of 153 hp and 180 lb ft of torque can only move a couple of tons so fast but thats okay. Here in Reno people aren't in a hurry most of the time and neither am I. If I lived in Sac or LA however, I would get run over daily I'm sure. I was busy all weekend making room for it in the garage so next weekend I think I'm going to find that fuel leak. I tightened the typical culprits stated on this board but I think its the hose going into the fuel filter thats leaking. I need to change the fuel filter anyways as it looks real old. And I think i'm going to tackle whatever door sensor is whackin out. Guess I'll start with the hatch like some of you suggested.

Well lets just say its no sports car and I won't ever challenge my wife to a race in her swagger wagon as it would completely blow the doors off sarge. Even in Reno we are between 4600 and 5000 feet depending on where you are at and so speed is definitely not the truck's strong suit.

Yeah, I'll take it off-road some but I think i'm just going to leave it pretty much stock because its so clean. Maybe down the road I'll start to have some fun with it if I ever pick up an inexpensive daily driver, but for now its meant to be reliable, get the fam over the hill and get me to and from work in the snow car because my wifes mini-van doesn't cut it. But don't worry its going to get some dirt on it heading up into the hills for shooting, hiking, chrismas tree hunting, etc. Its nevada after all!

Oh and I forgot to say something on that temp gauge. My temp gauge is the same way too, but its been pretty cold here. The other day when it was warm it creeped a little higher than that but I thought maybe these just run a little cooler? should that be closer to the half mark when all warmed up? what's typical for the temp gauge?