Thank you, Eric.

[Bryan]

There’s a certain amount of pride and satisfaction in taking something broken and fixing it.

There’s an even greater satisfaction to saving a friend who is having a difficult time financially a great deal of money by performing the labor (sorry, professional mechanics… they couldn’t afford a shop so had to make do with me) when something goes wrong with their vehicle. Eric’s site, after all, has a motto (forgive the paraphrasing): Where you go when your ride is broke and you’re also broke.”

It was because of reading the articles here on both theory (For diagnostic purposes) and practice (the actual -doing- of the repair) that I was able to fix my friend’s vehicle, and therefore I credit Eric and his site with the fix.

We were carpooling, doing 70 down the road in a 1997 Sentra GXE when the car did the ‘ZOMG I’M DYING RIGHT NOW!!” blinking CEL. Car started shuddering violently, lack of power, the whole shebang. So, now we’re on the side of the road without a single tool to work on.

The car would start, but there was clearly a dead miss in one of the cylinders. Given that we were less than 2 miles from home and that he didn’t have money for a tow, we made the decision to carefully gimp the car home.

Once I had my tools and code scanner, the fun began: Cylinder 2 misfire.

I could almost hear Eric’s voice walking me through the steps:

Pull the plug and inspect it: Plug looked good.
Verify spark: Weak spark. Dizzy cap and rotor were original (174k miles), and were replaced.
Verify spark: Strong spark now.

Test vehicle: Misfire remains.

Test#2: Swap plugs.
Result: Misfire remains on Cyl 2.

Test#3: Swap plug wires.
Result: Misfire remains on Cyl 2.

At this point, I suspected that it was a fueling issue… everything else looked good and there was no evidence of a broken piston. Given that the other cylinders were firing appropriately, I strongly believed it was the injector that’d packed it in. Given that I hadn’t the correct tools to properly test it and that all indications were that it WAS the injector… decided to go for it.

So, I took a few minutes to look things over and dismantled the bare minimum I needed to remove the fuel rail.
Pulled the fuel rail, pried the injector out and replaced it. Bolted it all back together, cleared the code, and tested the car.

Test#4: After injector #2 replacement
Result: CEL off, car running properly. Miss disappeared.

Eric, thank you again for this site and your patient wisdom and experience. It is far more appreciated than you know.

Respectfully,

Hinoki

Topic

[EricTheCarGuy]

It’s stories like this that get me out of bed in the morning. Whenever I’m feeling down about something, I think of reading things like this and suddenly, life isn’t so bad anymore. I can say to myself, “Eric, you’re doing good things and helping people, don’t worry about it”. After that all is good.

Thanks for sharing your experience here on the forum. I really appreciate it. Well done on the diagnosis and fix BTW.

SD

[Author]

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