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'93 SE 4x4 - Refusing to start (sometimes)


deanpence
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I unplugged the alarm under the driver seat, and truck starts/runs great, when it was plugged in, the battery life was very short, was always draining it. Now no worries and no stupid dead battery in morning.

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I think the NTB is on this site for the port installed wiring diagram. On the old school Nissan's the manufacture used a starter kill as part of the alarm system. Once you see how simple it is you can see why it really did not work if a thief knew where the jumper was

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  • 2 months later...

This is likely a newbie question, and I'm sorry if I missed someone mentioning it, but is the starter relay called something else? I've looked through both Haynes and the dealer manual; I see an inhibitor relay on one diagram, and on another I see an interlock relay, an interlock emergency relay, and a bulb check relay. No starter relay. On both diagrams, the battery's negative terminal goes straight to the starter motor, which then passes through at least one of the previously mentioned relays. I assume this is all basically a checklist of conditions that must be met before the relays switch on and eventually allow the current to pass to the ignition system.

 

O'Reilly's (only decent auto parts store in town) shows me starter relays for this Pathfinder, but I just can't find it in the truck itself.

 

On the passenger side of the engine compartment, I see a labeled black box with at least four relays, and then two blue relays are mounted in front of and behind that box. But I wasn't able to get out tonight and trace anything to the starter yet. I'll do that during daylight. I'll also be checking chassis grounds to make sure they're secure and checking the state of wires where necessary.

 

I think someone previously asked if I was using an AT or MT; it's an AT, and the engine is a 6-cylinder VG30E.

 

So is starter relay the best guess so far? I also saw the alarm system mentioned. If I have time tomorrow, I'll disable that; should I just tape up each wire and keep that alarm system branch completely out of the circuit?

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The way I understand it, the AT WD21 didn't come with a starter relay--that is, the ignition switch has to pass full power to the starter solenoid. The inhibitor relay just breaks the circuit if something's off (not in gear, whatever)--like a checklist, right. IIRC the manual trans rigs do have a proper starter relay (triggered by the ignition switch, connects + to the starter solenoid), so that may be what O'Reilly's is showing. Some people wire a starter relay into their A/T WD when the ignition switch gets too worn out to reliably power the solenoid.

 

If you suggest a bad relay, there are lots of relays under the hood, switch it with another and see if that changes anything. The service manual has a diagram of which relays are which--I ended up labeling a bunch of mine with a Sharpie so I'd know what I was looking at.

 

I unplugged my alarm once, just to see what would happen, and the truck still started. Some say it's got an ignition kill feature and two fat wires that have to be joined; maybe mine's PO bypassed that already. Not much help there, sorry.

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The AT versions don't have a starter relay. They require the current to take a long loop from the battery, through the ignition switch, through the inhibitor relay(it allows power to flow only when the shifter is in park or neutral), back around to the starter solenoid. When mine started acting up 14 years ago, I found that there was over 20 feet of light gauge wire, a bunch of connectors and a couple of switch contacts between the starter solenoid and the battery. My simple solution was to let the factory setup run a small 30 amp relay that ran straight from the battery positive terminal to the starter solenoid. Been working fine since. I suspect it is the ignition switch starter contact has melted/burned over time, that is what has happened to many of my older Nissans over the years.

 

With the factory alarm system, there is a starter interrupt, but it is setup backwards from what seems logical. The starter wires are connected unless the alarm is triggered, then it opens. Not an effective system, but is on a par with the rest of the crappy alarm unit.

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