2004 Nissan 350Z |
We had a day off of school/work, so what did NMS do? Worked on the Nissan 350Z Rallycross car of course! As a quick summary, this car came pretty cheap, so that's reason #1 we're planning to abuse it by driving it competitively in an off-road rallycross in March. Some problems are bigger than others, so we're sorting through the important stuff, and pretty much maxing out our car diagnosing and repair skills. Hey, if we were expert mechanics, it would be easy!
Brake pads? No problem! |
Top issues we're looking at are an electrical drain of the battery, some error codes relating mostly to the automatic transmission, and then making sure the suspension and brakes will hold up to a lot of bouncing around in the dirt. After watching a video on the Tesla Cyber truck, I bet it would do pretty well off-roading, but then again, we didn't spend the Tesla's asking price of $90,000 and up on this Nissan!
One good thing of this plan: we're planning on using the NMS-South truck and trailer to get the car to the event, so even if it totally blows up (yes, that's a technical term) we'll be able to get it back home. Or just light a match and burn it down in place. Ok, that was a joke, we wouldn't be so irresponsible to burn up a car. On purpose.
Easy job #1: the NMS-South Diagnostics Car-Inspecting Team suggested new rear brake pads, so we knocked that our quickly. Safety note: WITH the car safely on 4 big jack stands. This is a cheap car, we're going to drive it roughly in an off pavement environment, so what kind of brake pads did we use? Good question. Answer. The cheapest ones we could find! Rear brakes don't' work as hard as front brakes, and it's a low cost thing, remember?OK, not the worst pads in the world, but we replaced them.
Easy job #2: To start dealing with the transmission, we wanted to at least look at the transmission fluid, see what shape it is in, and check the level. There can be a lot of expensive bad things going on here, so we tried the cheapest/easiest things first. One thing we learned is that this car has a transmission dipstick, which is cleverly bolted down. Instead of just pulling up on the typical dipstick that has a handle or ring, this doesn't have that! Good to know info! Short answer: this car was good on fluid level at operating temperature, so now we wanted to take a peak.
We drained the transmission fluid out of the pan, and while sure it was very black, it didn't smell super bad, and didn't have big chunks of metal in it either. This was as far as we really wanted to diagnose the transmission for now, so we replaced the amount of fluid we took out with new fluid, and moved on, even though we haven't fixed it yet.
We drained about 4.5 quarts of automatic transmission fluid.
Easy job #3: Test drive with scan tool. Bad news, as we drove the battery was showing less than 12 volts. This thing just drives terribly, from the transmission to the steering, and including the non-adjustable seats.
Conclusion for now: We have a new alternator we can put on and probably fix the charging problem, but I can' imagine that's going to help with the transmission and seats.
New fluid ready to go. |
The engine seems to be OK and is putting out some power, but we're starting to have to question if we can address all these issues, or if we need to reconsider. For now the NMS executive council is going to have to put their heads together and decide where we go with this project.
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