2012 Nissan Xterra

[AKROVER]

The Nissan is barely over 57,000 miles. I bought a new battery last week. The old one was over five years old and one cold morning it wouldn’t start. I probably hadn’t done anything to get the battery to a good state of charge after storing it for two months and then taking lots of short trips in cold weather, but the battery was old enough not to bother messing around with it. It wasn’t much fun changing a battery in a windy apartment parking lot on a cold day with mounting hardware that is now over ten years old and a bit rusty. It didn’t help that I pounded on the one support to break it free of the cross brace to get the old battery out since that messed up the threads for reassembly. The vehicle is running well. We made the 130 mile round trip to our property three times this week with it so the new battery is certainly charged. It could use a little bit of attention, primarily for rust, but I won’t have a good place to work on it until I get our house built. I really have no idea how long I will hold on to this, but it is now my personal time record for ownership of a vehicle and there is nothing really concerning about its current condition. It does provide a sharp contrast to the VW in terms of driving dynamics, but it also provides a good compliment in terms of purposes.

[AKROVER]

Today I washed both cars. I think the last time I washed the Nissan was in Ecuador. The rear bumper is showing some rust along some edges. I should probably get a can of rustoleum. I wonder what the frame is looking like. I also replaced the floor mats today. I bought a set of cheap carpeted floor mats when I first bought the Nissan and I had finally worn a hole through the driver’s side so I thought I should replace the mats to protect the original carpeting. I decided to get rubber mats this time as we seem to be tracking up both cars regularly with our muddy hiking boots. I bought a cheap set of cut-to-fit mats for $20 at Walmart and they fit well with minimal cutting. As a final effort today, I dropped the tire pressure. I used to run elevated pressures for trailering, particularly in the rears. All four were still sitting at close to 50 psi so I dropped them to 40 which is still above the door plate 35. I might drop them further as we do some trail driving, but traction isn’t typically an issue around here. The big question is whether lower pressure will improve or worsen the squirm on the grooved roads. It is quite annoying how these tires dance around. We live right on the outer loop of Rapid City which is groovy with a 60mph speed limit, so I get to enjoy the dancing on every trip with the Nissan. The VW has no such issues at all so it is the squirm of the big tread on the still relatively low-mile Nissan tires. Unfortunately, I do seem to have a TPMS issue as the dash light has been on for a couple weeks and won’t reset. It is probably a bad sensor and not worth messing with until the next time I get tires, but I am sure the sensors were rebuilt a couple years ago when I put the tires on.

A couple weeks ago, I reinstalled my GPS. I had taken it out prior to shipping to Ecuador and I never installed it there as my GPS doesn’t have maps for anything other than North America. It was a bit of a project fishing the wires through the dash. I thought about just using a phone for navigation here, but my one major annoyance with current nav apps is that none of them display elevation. I like seeing my elevation while driving as it can easily change by more than 3000 feet when driving into the hills. That can have a big impact on weather.

[AKROVER]

The Nissan is up to 59,906 miles and is exactly 11 years old today. Two days ago, I washed the vehicle and cleaned up the interior. Between yesterday and a little bit of time this morning, I finally addressed the rusting rear bumper. I completely removed the bumper (and trailer hitch as it uses some of the same bolts), prepped it, and painted it flat black (originally silver). With the bumper off, I fixed a broken line on my air suspension. I also replaced the rusted screws holding my trailer plug with more appropriate (and surprisingly expensive) stainless hardware. I applied plastic restorer (Cerakote) to some of the extensive plastic on the vehicle that was looking a little chalky, particularly that plastic piece on the top of the bumper. I also rotated the tires. My prep work on the bumper was pretty crude so there are still a few swirl marks from the wire wheels I was using to strip the rust, but the flat black hides it really well. The underneath of the vehicle actually looks pretty clean for an 11-year-old vehicle. All eight bumper bolts came out with only a little persuasion required on a couple of them. I think I got to this project at the right time as the rust around the license plate lights hadn’t yet affected the structure (the lights snapped back in confidently after cleaning up and painting the bumper). I probably should have done something about the rust on the trailer hitch while I was doing this, but I don’t want to lose the weight rating sticker (somewhat important if I rent a trailer again) and I was afraid that trying to fix just the rusty spots on a glossy-finished part was going to come out ugly.



This is the first chance I have had to really work on a vehicle in a very long time. If you aren’t aware, we abandoned our home building project and simply bought a house that is a short walk from downtown Hot Springs, South Dakota. My 24X24 garage is a great workspace, particularly since I have two other outbuildings for storage, a one-car garage and a 20X50 pole building with a mostly gravel floor (which was also a great place to paint the bumper and keep the fumes out of my main work area). Since moving to Alaska in 2005, I have been operating on just a set of hand tools that my parents bought me in the 1980’s. I have done brake jobs and winter tire changeouts using screw jacks and ratchet wrenches. In the last few weeks, I have spent over $2000 on tools so I am once again capable of doing quick tire rotations. It was fun to be buying so many new tools at my age. Battery power has replaced air and is much nicer to work with. It is silly that I am particularly excited about having the first nice floor jack in my life. When I lived in Newbury, I had an extensive collection of tools, but my floor jacks were cheap junky ones that worked well enough that I never bothered to replace them.

[Basement Paul]

A heater and everything! Looks like the good life.

-BP

[AKROVER]

Today’s effort was rocker panels. A few years ago, I removed the front mud flaps and the deflectors that were mounted on the front side of the rear wheel wells. From the stone chip patterns on my rocker panels, it appears that Nissan had a good design with those plastic pieces. Now that high speed gravel is a common occurrence, I have decided to put the flaps back on, but first I had to address the seriously chipped up rocker panels. The thousands of chips were deep. It looked like they went all the way to the metal, but none of them were rusty yet so the metal was still coated with some of the original primer. I bought some 120 grit pads for my battery powered sander and cleaned things up, going to bare metal in some of the heavily chipped areas and simply roughing up the surface for the rest of it. I then moved the Nissan to the pole building for the painting. The Nissan barely fit as the taller of the two garage doors is still not high enough to completely clear the roof rack. I put some cardboard between the rack and the door and just slid along slowly. Getting the Nissan back out will require an assistant, although perhaps some dead weight in the cargo area will be enough to drop the back end a half inch. Here's a partial picture of the inside of my 5-car pole building. The pile of junk in front of the Nissan is mostly packing materials from moving.



Once in the pole building, I rolled and brushed on Herculiner bedliner. This changes the rockers from white to black. I think it looks decent for an offroad vehicle. I went with Herculiner because it has a good reputation for holding up and because using bedliner as a finish meant that prep work didn’t have to be perfect. This will hide my crude prep even better than the flat black on the rear bumper, although the bigger problem on the rear bumper was the wire wheels used to scour the rust pits rather than the course sandpaper swirls. On the Xterra forums, Herculiner is popular for exterior finish on everything, including wheels, but hopefully I will be keeping it just to the barely visible lower panel. I'll post another picture once it dries and I mount the mudflaps/deflectors.

[MostMint]

Lower the tire air pressure to 10 PSI or less that should give you clearance

[AKROVER]

Here is an image with the dark gray flaps reinstalled over the black rockers.



I only took the black up to the door and there were a few chips in the white above that (some of the big ones are visible in the image above). I have since dug out my very old bottle of white touchup which was still liquid enough to fill the chips. I also re-torqued the wheel lugs after putting some miles on after the tire rotation. While driving it this weekend, I felt some strange resistance while turning tight at low speed (like 4WD on dry surface) so I jacked up each front wheel and verified that the hubs were disengaged. I also jacked up the rear and verified that the differential wasn’t somehow locked (it has a locking diff with a switch on the dash). I now suspect it was just the deep squirmy tread on an unusual surface multiplied by the fact that I have just been on a long road trip with a much better-behaved vehicle. I will drive it some more this week to see if I can duplicate that sense of resistance.

Getting it out of the pole building wasn’t too hard. I tried to drop the tire pressure, but it is such a slow process with these giant tires. I made it to 20psi and had almost no impact on vehicle height, but a significant impact on rolling resistance. I didn’t have anything heavy in the pole building to weigh it down, so I simply alternated small movements with the truck and the garage door to inch my way out (if it goes in, it will come out).

Here is a picture showing the black bumper and quarter panel from a distance and my new steeply sloped backyard with the one-car and two-car garages. Part of the 5-car capable pole building can be seen in the very back behind the pines with the vertical corrugated metal siding.

[Basement Paul]

More garage than yard. My kind of place.

-BP

[AKROVER]

I got a “new addition” last week, too, but mine is clearly intended for 4X8 sheet materials and other obvious light duty utility purposes; no one accusing me of ulterior motives. I have been debating the intelligence of buying a utility trailer. I can probably rent U-Haul trailers a hundred times for the price of this trailer and the U-Haul dealer is just a couple blocks away, but residual values on trailers have been remarkable in recent decades so I suspect when I finally no longer find it useful, the actual cost per use will be a lot lower than a U-haul. The huge advantage is simply convenience. For example, before bringing it home from Rapid City, I loaded it with sheets of drywall for the garage and I didn’t have to unload when I got home. I simply rolled the trailer around the garage and worked right out of it, saving me from handling each sheet multiple times. This is an expensive utility trailer, but Fleet Farm had three of them manufactured in 2021 that they were clearing out for a reasonably tempting price ($1999). I certainly have room to store this indoors, so the only real question was one of value.

This trailer is mostly aluminum and incredibly lightweight. It rides on a torsion axle instead of the usual bouncy noisy leaf springs of cheap utility trailers. The axle is rated at just over a ton and the trailer only weighs a little over 400 so it has 1600+ lbs of payload capacity. It only has 12” wheels, but it does have the larger 5.3” tires instead of the more common 4.8”. The tires are M rated (81mph) which was a critical concern given the 70mph speed limit between here and Rapid City where most supplies will come from (many cheap trailers are using K rated tires which are only 68mph). The bed is 56” wide and just long enough to load an 8’ sheet and still fold up the ramp. The floor is treated plywood with a plastic cover. No slats means it would work for hauling light loads of dirt, but unloading would be manual (no dump). There are adjustable tie downs on the side panels and a channel in the center of the floor where I could add more tie down points. The ramp is removable and being aluminum, it is pretty easy to handle when taking it off and putting it back on. I was thrilled when I got it home and found out that my ancient gutter mount roof racks that I used on the Express van when we left Alaska clamp right onto the tops of the sides. This will make hauling kayaks easy, although the ramp has to come off for that purpose. Yesterday I also fabricated a bike rack for hauling our hefty E-bikes that have been breaking my back lifting in and out of the Nissan. Now we will just roll them up the ramp and quickly strap them into place, no more removing the front tires. The trailer is light enough that I could tow it with the VW, but the Nissan is already set up for towing and a more appropriate choice.

The Nissan is now just over 61,000 miles. I found a shop here in Hot Springs that charges a lot less for an oil change than I used to pay in Buffalo so last week it got its first oil change in a very long time. I am still running full synthetic. It has seen less than 5000 miles of use over the last year and a half since returning from Ecuador, so it appears to be destined to be a one-owner low mileage classic. The usage was so low over the winter that the battery went dead after sitting for almost two months. It is seeing more use now that the weather is nicer. We are doing more projects around the house, and heading up more of the back roads. Kris and I have also been heading separate ways a few times as we get involved in more of our new community so the two-vehicle paradigm still makes sense.

It has been acting up a little lately. It seems like an occasional complete electrical hiccup, so complete even the trip computer sometimes resets. It is usually only a brief interruption, barely noticeable with no stalling, but something is going on. I thought I found a likely problem as the battery had come loose and the positive terminal hasn’t had an insulating cover since I replaced the original corroded terminal back in 2017, but the glitch has happened a couple of times since I clamped down the battery securely. Some quick research indicates that this is a common symptom with XTerras with numerous sensor related possibilities suggested (cam position sensors, crank position sensor, MAF sensor). None of that makes any logical sense for the apparent electrical symptom and I am not getting any codes, but it might be time to replace a few sensors. There is also a slightly more sinister culprit for similar symptoms, a bad relay on the power control board, but that problem appears to be isolated to earlier years of this generation of Xterras (and a few other Nissans, as well). So far it isn’t really a problem, but hiccups on a back road with no cell coverage is always disconcerting.

[MostMint]

If this was mine I would locate every grounding point in the vehicle and clean them. Also I would re-seat all the fuses. At 12+ years old you are officially entering into old car territory. If this is not a common problem with this model (I assume Google is telling you its not) then it may be related to the specific conditions yours has been living in and gone through as it traveled the world - which could include any number of critters chewing on the wires or possibly rough roads adding up to enough abrasions that something is occasionally touching something it should not. A scan tool might help isolate the problem.