Scottzilla

You can pull the entire engine, tranny and transfer case all in one piece; I just got done doing just that. The tricky bit is that it is all very long so you need something like a hoist hung on something high up to do it. Remove the front differential, the exhaust pipe that runs across underneath, and that one cross-member that stuff is bolted to so that you can tip the whole thing up and out.

This is a slightly different question. Does anybody know what the two senders/sensors/???s sticking out of the passenger's side of the automatic tranny are for exactly? I need to do some reconstructive wiring on mine and am wondering if they are just switches or solenoids or something where polarity doesn't matter. I did notice that on an '88 they are wired in series while on the '89 they each get their own pair of wires...

Heh, that's pretty funny. I'm trying really hard to talk myself out of doing the same thing right now...

Yeah, you guys are right. I think it's time to give up on my Maxima engine and get something that will drop in a little easier. My Pathfinder has been apart for several months now and I really want to play with it again. I'm in Bellevue, WA (98008). Ideally I'd like to find something within driving distance so nobody had to ship anything, but if I can't I'll keep you guys in mind.

So basically I'm stuck on this whole long crank snout / short crank snout thing. I'm guessing that the donor engine is out of a '93-ish Maxima and it has the short snout and tooth belts. Since my Pathy is an '89 it's got a long snout and V belts. I'd rather not have to change the crank out. Is there a way for me to make the different length snout work? I don't really care which belt style I end up with as long as everything works. I searched the forums and found something about using a spacer kit, but I couldn't find much in the way of details.

Don't forget 8) Superpunk; light fireworks on 4th of July. They don't even need fuses...

I looked up the VQ30de and it looks a lot different than what I have. I'm starting to think the guy I got it from just guessed on the year of the car it was out of.

yozsi: You're right, I meant to type VG30E instead of I. unccpathfinder: Thanks for all the pictures! The blocks look the same, and it looks like my tranny will mate up just fine. The shaft is different and the dip stick is in a different location. Are those easy to move? It was getting dark and I couldn't tell what was plugging the unused dipstick hole or how easy it would be to unplug.

I ended up having to use Vice-Grips and a hacksaw to get my rotor off last time. They sure do get stuck on there sometimes...

First off, let me start by suggesting that it's never a good idea to let your timing belt come loose: (Terrible camera-phone picture of cracked piston) Anyway, I picked up a VG30i from a '96 (the guy said) Maxima (48k miles, $50) and am wondering if anybody knows what all I might run into when swapping it in. So far I've noticed that the shaft is smaller/shorter, so it looks like I'm going to have to keep all of the Maxima pulleys and switch to an electric fan. Looks like it should work but I don't know if I can swap pulleys on the AC compressor yet. Does anybody know of any problems in doing this?

I was afraid that was the answer. Thanks though! (I always hate forgetting to do the heatshrink first )

This is a long shot but when mine was doing this it turned out that one of the electrical connectors by the throttle body was loose.

Does anybody know if the big wire bundle that goes into the side of the tranny comes out? It's the one where there are like 6 or so wires going into some epoxy in a round white plastic thing. I pulled the sheath back on mine today and noticed that one wire is broken and a few others are about to go. I'm guessing it might explain the problem I'm having with the "power" button not working. I'd like to fix it but I don't know if that round thing is a connector that I can pull out or if the wires just run through it into the guts of the tranny. Given the current fragile state of the wires I'm a little afraid to go tugging on anything...