Injection pump leak

General information about the first-generation Nissan Maxima in the US. What was the Datsun 810 became the luxury leader Maxima in the US in 1981.

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Duaneclark
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Location: Peyton Colorado

Injection pump leak

#1

Post by Duaneclark »

Wanted to mention about a injection pump leak. We do know that they can leak eventually. One car started a pretty good leak, to the point that I parked it for around 6 years. So 2 years ago I started it up, and there was no leak, and I changed nothing. I've been driving this car for 2 years now mostly shorter trips with no leak at all. Thought I'd mention this to everyone, I thought it was a strange occurrence.
Duane
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asavage
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Re: Injection pump leak

#2

Post by asavage »

Switching back and forth to/from biodiesel can speed up the IP's front seal wear rate. Best to stick with one or the other, from what I gather.
Regards,
Al S.

1982 Maxima diesel wagon, 2nd & 4th owner, 165k miles, rusty & burgundy/grey. Purchased 1996, SOLD 16Feb10
1983 Maxima diesel wagon, 199k miles, rusty, light yellow/light brown. SOLD 14Jul07
1981 720 SD22 (scrapped 04Sep07)
1983 Sentra CD17, 255k, bought 06Jul08, gave it away 22Jun10.
Duaneclark
Posts: 107
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Location: Peyton Colorado

Re: Injection pump leak

#3

Post by Duaneclark »

As far as that vehicle it was the same fuel from 6 years ago, pump diesel. I could see that the risk of contaminants in bio diesel causing accelerated wear. Just seen in the news today about the American diesel having poorer lubricity than Euorpean fuel, and causing pump failures in America with a lot of modern diesels. When I remember, I try to pour some 2 cycle lubricant in my diesel fuel tanks.
Duane
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asavage
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Re: Injection pump leak

#4

Post by asavage »

The seal material is susceptible to biodiesel weakening it, making the elastomer "softer", which is not necessarily a bad thing, but switching back and forth ends up accelerating the wear rate of the material.

This is a separate issue from particle contamination in the fuel (which any good diesel filter should catch long before the IP). It's more a chemistry problem than a physical wear problem, from what I recall.

I sold my last diesel (the '99 E300) around 2018, and even then I was down to TWO B100 stations in the greater Puget Sound. It just got too hard to make the two fillups per month I'd needed when I was still commuting, and I had my first EV by then, which was a whole lot easier (and cheaper) to commute in. Sold it, never looked back (lost about $4k on it, though).
Regards,
Al S.

1982 Maxima diesel wagon, 2nd & 4th owner, 165k miles, rusty & burgundy/grey. Purchased 1996, SOLD 16Feb10
1983 Maxima diesel wagon, 199k miles, rusty, light yellow/light brown. SOLD 14Jul07
1981 720 SD22 (scrapped 04Sep07)
1983 Sentra CD17, 255k, bought 06Jul08, gave it away 22Jun10.
nissan_nerd
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Re: Injection pump leak

#5

Post by nissan_nerd »

My IP stopped leaking once I switched from bio diesel to regular diesel. Hope get a lot more miles out of it before I need to do something about it!
1982 Maxima Diesel
1984 Maxima Gasser
Duaneclark
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Joined: 11 years ago
Location: Peyton Colorado

Re: Injection pump leak

#6

Post by Duaneclark »

That makes perfect sense Al. My wording was a little off, I was thinking contaminants as chemical differences in the bio fuel not compatible with the seal material. Less lubricity could cause more wear on the seal too. It's sure funny how my pump was leaking, I would say at least moderate to where you wouldn't want to use the vehicle, then after sitting for 6 years the leak went away. In mechanical things we've never seen it all, always a new experience. Not sold on electrics yet, other than short in town commutes. The initial expense is high, the depreciation is high, and then as used vehicles I don't see a viable market for electrics with batteries that could expire soon. I regularly commute on a 630 mile trip between Colorado and New Mexico, I wouldn't feel comfortable with an electric unless the range was at least 1000 miles. At this time charging stations along the trip are meager.
Duane
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asavage
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Re: Injection pump leak

#7

Post by asavage »

There's a lot to be said about EVs, but the short of it is that we have to go there.

Need:
The Transportation sector accounts for ~17% of global CO2 emissions, and while air travel (2%?) and shipping (a bit more!) are some of that, the balance is cars & trucks. Moving to electric -- even with fossil fuel power plants -- is actually the lowest of the low-hanging fruit in reducing CO2 emissions, and the power grid in major countries is getting cleaner every year.

Range (and Range Anxiety):
In the US, 84% of people live in "cities" of some kind or some definition. Most people drive less than 30 mi./day. From a need standpoint, we don't need the ability to drive 300 mi/day, but a couple of studies have shown that when US car buyers are surveyed on what would reduce anxiety about range when driving an EV, the number "300 miles" of range per charge seems to be around where people become more comfortable.

My personal journey to EV is that I recognized the value in the 1970s, but I never had the resources to buy or build even a lead-acid powered EV until pretty late in life, when I got interested in the Jet EV600 (Subaru 600/Sambar with a factory conversion to DC motor and lead-acid batteries, circa 1980) when they resurfaced as used vehicles in my area around 2006. When California "compliance EVs" started hitting the used market on the West Coast around 2016, I was already looking to buy my first EV, a Nissan Leaf of some sort. I had a budget and was doing my online research about years to avoid, pitfalls to expect, and the real issues with short battery life in the very first three years of Leaf -- due to Nissan's design choice of air-cooling the batteries, and how poorly that worked in hot climates like Arizona.

(sidebar: Lithium-Ion (LI-ion) batteries, as opposed to other chemistries such as Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) and such, are finicky about temperature: they like to be not too hot, not too cold, and that range is typically about 50° to 100°F. And they make their own heat when either driving (discharging) or charging, so you need cooling for both of those conditions as well as when just driving. Imagine trying to fast-charge in Phoenix or Texas in 110°F weather: how do you air-cool the battery with hot ambient air? Can't. And, that's why when you have an EV, the air-conditioning system must be working, because it's not there to just cool you, it's there to also cool the pack.)

2017: While researching the Leaf, I stumbled across the EV I eventually ended up buying, and still own: a GEN2 Toyota RAV4 EV (2012-2014) which is a 2012 RAV4 chassis (all three years used the old chassis) with a variation of a Tesla Model S drive unit (DU), installed backwards from the way it is in the Model S; and with a custom battery pack that uses Model S cells but configured in smaller modules than the Model S, to end up with around 60% of the Model S' capacity: 38kwh.

Meanwhile, I'd plunked down $1,000 reservation for a Tesla Model 3, because it was supposed to drive itself, and I was commuting for the foreseeable future 60 mi./day into and out of Seattle, and I hate city driving like that. Of the 80 vehicles I'd bought/sold/trashed over the years, none had been new -- I hate the depreciation -- but life is short and I was finally willing to take the depreciation hit if a new car would do the driving. But, the Model 3 wasn't going to ship till 2018, so in the meantime, I bought an off-lease RAV4 EV, as a temporary EV for commuting, and sold the biodiesel-burning '99 MB E300 which I loved to look at but was only so-so on driving, and which refused to stay fixed: something was always malfunctioning on that car, and there was a lot to go wrong on an old MB!

Well, I installed a $500 charging station on the side of my garage, and started commuting via EV for the first time. The EPA range of the GEN2 RAV4 EV is "only" 103 mi., which is still a lot better than a Leaf, or several other low-end EVs of that era, but in the four years I commuted in it, I never once "ran out" of juice, and I was able to comfortably make all the side-trips and errands I wanted.

I've been towed due to out of fuel once: about five months ago, the GOM (Guess-O-Meter) on the dash said I had five miles range left, but I only made it 1.5 mi. on flat ground and it shut off. That was the only time it happened (so far).

It's amazing how little range you find you actually need -- most people, that is. You think you need all this range, but for 98% of my driving, the EV is fine. When we needed to go further, we generally took the AWD Sienna.

By the time my Tesla Model 3 reservation got called -- around Sep2018 -- I had driven the little RAV4 EV 15k miles and realized that I didn't need to drop $56k to get a adequate EV, and also it was clear that the Model 3 was not self-driving after all. Turns out, my partner's Infiniti was aging-out, at around 200k miles and burning a lot of oil, so he bought the Model 3 instead and we owned it all through Covid, finally selling it last year -- and I did not like it after all, though I drove it a couple thousand miles. So, I still have the RAV4 EV and the AWD Sienna, and the Sienna only gets driven when I need to haul a couch or tow a utility trailer more than 50 miles, or things like that. I can fit 8' long stuff in the RAV4 EV fine (using a towel on the dash) with all doors closed, and I have had a 4x6' sheet of plywood inside (though my belly was up against the steering wheel).

Battery life:
Like ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) engines, batteries wear out. Like ICE engines, there are strategies you can use to accelerate or delay that wear. And, like ICE engines, batteries can be replaced. Really, they can.

Early EVs have had well-publicized battery degradation and outright failures. But, IMO, that era of EV batteries is now behind us (for the most part). Tesla battery monitoring for about a decade has shown that even the very earliest Model S batteries are largely still operating over the 85% capacity mark. On the other end of the spectrum, 2011-2013 Nissan Leaf batteries have an enormous failure rate and high degradation, before they moved to a different chemistry. But modern batteries are not failing or degrading like the early ones, and unlike ICE engines, there's a secondary market to re-use degraded automotive EV batteries: people are eager to buy your 60% capacity Leaf battery, they will give you good money for it.

Resale value:
Yeah, a ten-year-old Leaf or Fiat 500EV or Chevy Spark EV isn't worth much . . . but, it wasn't worth much when it was new, either. I don't know what to say here, used cars' values vary all over the board, and buying old examples of early tech is never going to be expensive, because the new tech is so much better. It's not that a 10-yr-old Chevy Spark EV is a worse car now than when new, it's that few people are willing to buy a car with 60 mile range when for a few more dollars they could buy, say, a VW e-Golf or used Mini-e or whatever. The old Spark EV just isn't that attractive for what it does compared to newer stock.

Inconvenience:
Does moving from an ICE to EV involve compromise? Yup. I'm not going to argue that fast-charging an EV is as convenient as gassing up an ICE vehicle: there just are not enough fast-charging locations yet, you still have to use an app (PlugShare is the best) to locate a fast-charge station, and there are large swaths of the US that just don't have them in sufficient quantity to make long-distance travel convenient. But! Most people don't need to drive long distance even monthly, so while inconvenient, it's not daily inconvenient.

In the end, I like to ask, "how much inconvenience are you willing to put up with, in order to be a better steward of the planet?". That's one perspective, but it's not the only one. There really are lots of pros to EVs: regenerative braking is so much more satisfying than turning braking energy into heat and brake pad dust. Going downhill refills my "gas tank". I plug in when I get home, so every time I go out to drive, my "gas tank" is full -- never go to a gas station, ever. No ICE oil changes (yes, my transmission has 1.5 quarts of ATF that have to be changed . . . every 50k!). Brakes don't wear out anymore. Quiet. Heavy battery is down low under the floor, so cornering is much better. Etc.

EVs are what we're driving, now and in the near future. Whether its market forces, legislation, or half of Florida underwater in the next 40 years, there's a reason for everyone, just pick one, but EVs are what we're driving.
Regards,
Al S.

1982 Maxima diesel wagon, 2nd & 4th owner, 165k miles, rusty & burgundy/grey. Purchased 1996, SOLD 16Feb10
1983 Maxima diesel wagon, 199k miles, rusty, light yellow/light brown. SOLD 14Jul07
1981 720 SD22 (scrapped 04Sep07)
1983 Sentra CD17, 255k, bought 06Jul08, gave it away 22Jun10.
Duaneclark
Posts: 107
Joined: 11 years ago
Location: Peyton Colorado

Re: Injection pump leak

#8

Post by Duaneclark »

Thanks for the in depth reply, I'm sure the future will be interesting as we go along. One factor is the explosion of technology exponentially, so I can imagine that the vehicles of today will be dramatically different in 10 years, electric and fossil fuels. For myself, as long as diesel and gas is available I don't see why I can't continue to drive what I have for years to come. There may be other comments on this forum come along that will be interesting to read. Completely different subject, a few years ago I was interested in a Maxima drive shaft for the 1984 Gas automatic wagon. Your son said none of the driveshafts were labeled and asked for measurement. Right then there was 12" of snow, so didn't get back with your son. I was wondering if I could just buy all of your saved driveshafts if they're still there? Thanks, Duane
Duane
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asavage
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Re: Injection pump leak

#9

Post by asavage »

Duane, I haven't had any Maxima parts since at least 2010; I'm sorry I can't help with the driveshaft.
Regards,
Al S.

1982 Maxima diesel wagon, 2nd & 4th owner, 165k miles, rusty & burgundy/grey. Purchased 1996, SOLD 16Feb10
1983 Maxima diesel wagon, 199k miles, rusty, light yellow/light brown. SOLD 14Jul07
1981 720 SD22 (scrapped 04Sep07)
1983 Sentra CD17, 255k, bought 06Jul08, gave it away 22Jun10.
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