2012 Nissan Xterra

Update your progress on your various car projects.

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AKROVER
Posts: 177
Joined: Thu Sep 01, 2005 2:49 am
Location: Anchorage, Alaska

Re: 2012 Nissan Xterra

Post by 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
Posts: 177
Joined: Thu Sep 01, 2005 2:49 am
Location: Anchorage, Alaska

Re: 2012 Nissan Xterra

Post by 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
Posts: 177
Joined: Thu Sep 01, 2005 2:49 am
Location: Anchorage, Alaska

Re: 2012 Nissan Xterra

Post by 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.

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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.

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Basement Paul
Posts: 3372
Joined: Sun Jul 17, 2005 9:27 pm
Location: In the dirt.

Re: 2012 Nissan Xterra

Post by Basement Paul »

A heater and everything! Looks like the good life.

-BP
AKROVER
Posts: 177
Joined: Thu Sep 01, 2005 2:49 am
Location: Anchorage, Alaska

Re: 2012 Nissan Xterra

Post by 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.

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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.

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MostMint
Posts: 2714
Joined: Thu Jul 21, 2005 12:11 pm
Location: planning a race

Re: 2012 Nissan Xterra

Post by MostMint »

Lower the tire air pressure to 10 PSI or less that should give you clearance
[quote="Basement Paul"]Is that a mint rocketship on the hood?? :shock:
-BP[/quote]
AKROVER
Posts: 177
Joined: Thu Sep 01, 2005 2:49 am
Location: Anchorage, Alaska

Re: 2012 Nissan Xterra

Post by AKROVER »

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

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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.


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Basement Paul
Posts: 3372
Joined: Sun Jul 17, 2005 9:27 pm
Location: In the dirt.

Re: 2012 Nissan Xterra

Post by Basement Paul »

More garage than yard. My kind of place.

-BP
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