Oil Change

Oil change for the 1996 D21 Pickup today.  142,238 miles.  Mobil 1 High Mileage 10w30. STP XL oil filter.  For some reason the M1-208 oil filters are impossible to find now.

The Rogue's FIrst Oil Change

This post serves nothing more than a record of an oil change for our 2019 Rogue.  5049 miles on 2/9/2020.  These aren't the droids you're looking for... move along...

Pure Energy

Wow, has it been a while since I've done any work on the 280z!  I was able to take advantage of a beautiful day today and spend an hour or so under the hood.

This time I installed a new coil.  Why? I have been chasing an irregular miss while the engine warms up.  Coils are cheap and the one on my car looked to be the original so why not give a new one a shot?  Yes, yes, I know what you are saying: don't just swap parts but rather diagnose the problem.  For me this is an easy way to see if the problem changes or best case goes away.  It also gives me a chance to clean up some crusty terminals and nasty looking brackets.

After removing the coil you can see just how green and crusty those terminals have become over 40 years.

After removing the ballast resistor I used an ohmmeter to verify that the resistance still met factory spec (which is conveniently stamped on the bottom of the bracket: .9 ohms between the + terminal and the center terminal, .4 ohms between the COM and center terminals).  This one was still in spec which is good because you can't buy them anymore!  I cleaned up all terminals as well as the bracket and ceramics.  The bracket received a fresh coat of paint along with the coil bracket.

I also created new jumper wires between the resistor and the coil since the older units looked pretty nasty. As usual for me the terminal rings were both crimped and soldered.

I chose a Pertronix Flamethrower coil (model 14001 - 1.5 ohms) after reading a few articles and experiences from those who had used one.  Apparently a factory-spec .9 ohm coil is very hard to come by but after some reading the Pertronix should work fine as long as the factory resistor is left in-place.  

Before installing the refreshed resistor and new coil I cleaned up the ring terminals from the factory harness and crimped new spade terminals since the old copper units looked pretty nasty.  

The end result was something that looked factory fresh but with the shiny copper should provide a clean path for that energy to get to the spark plugs.

So did it cure the intermittent miss at idle when warming up?  Maybe.  The test run went well but I want to give it a few runs before making a final verdict.