Real-World Scenario
I’ll leave you with a Nissan story that happened just the other day: The phone rings and it’s one of our better clients letting us know that his 2002 Frontier just stopped running and is getting towed in. Whenever we get a car on the hook, I like to do a quick triage to find out what we are facing so that parts can be sourced and we can let the customer know when they’ll be back on the road. While we usually have a more experienced tech take care of it, when time permits, I like to let the newer techs take a look to get experience. This was one of those times.
This Frontier used the single-cam version of the V6 with a distributer, and our tech’s first thought was the fuel pump or maybe even the pump bracket was off since we have seen weather take its toll on that wiring in the past. As a quick check, he introduced a little fuel into the manifold to see if the truck would start and die. In this case, the truck just cranked with no attempt to start. The next step was to check for spark, where he found none coming out of the cap.
Moving along, since this model had an internal coil, the distributor cap was removed in order to check for spark at the coil. With the cap removed, it was noted the rotor was in tough shape and there was some movement in the shaft in the upper part of the distributer shaft. It was also noted that it was a rebuilt distributer, which isn’t unusual on older cars since it was serviced as a unit and there had been some problems with position sensors.
With the spark tester hooked to the coil tower, there was no spark, but now our tech knew why — the distributor wasn’t turning. Taking a few bolts out of the timing cover allowed him to confirm that the timing belt teeth were stripped off at the crank pulley. His first question was, “Why didn’t it spin effortlessly like the other broken belt jobs I’ve done?” But rather than just answer him, we engaged in a discussion, and he realized that since the cams were still in-time, the pistons were pushing against some compression. Armed with the knowledge of a bad belt, it did sound like it was spinning pretty easily. Luckily for the customer, these engines are freewheeling, and it suffered no internal damage. We were able to tighten the screw in the distributer to eliminate the play in the rotor.
Like always, my articles won’t make you a Nissan expert, but I do hope they get you to think and encourage you to learn all you can about the capabilities of your scan tools and how they can accelerate your service efforts.
