I’ve Been Wu’d

Not many people will get that, but it makes me laugh. Had this daily driver come into the shop this week after I turned down the job on the car. That’s getting Rich Wu’d. In fact I blame Rich. He called me and asked me about the repair for his brother, and not really knowing much about Nissan’s, other than the fact that girls drive them (and Rich, he’s had like 10), I turned it down as I was too busy with Porsche work to be able to take the time to research the repair or tools needed for this particular job. In a slow time, sure we take on this kind of stuff all the time, but I knew it would be a few weeks before I could even think about diving into it. Not really sure how it happened, but it showed up anyway and I didn’t have a choice. A perfect example of getting Wu’d. The car had been sitting for the last month or so as it was making a horrible noise from the engine. The dealer had looked at it and said the timing chain tensioner was bad and needed to be replaced, but the repair was very expensive, so the owner declined. Next thing you know it is in my parking lot 🙂 So in a quick effort to rid my parking lot of non-Porsche automobiles (not really, we work on anything), I threw it on the lift to check it out. I like it when they put “do not start” notes on the dash…..cause unless I see fit otherwise, I’m gonna start the car, lol. How else are you going to diagnose it? Funny thing is, once I started it, I could tell we had some type of accessory pulley or component going bad. If there was a bad timing chain tensioner, there was no way you could hear it over the noise!

Putting my stethoscope on the cam cover, I couldn’t hear any timing chain tensioner noise….above the other racket that is.

Looked at the accessory pulleys to see if something was wobbling, and noticed the issue immediately. The AC compressor clutch was locked and needed to be replaced (it has literally melted internally). So I threw on a new compressor and the noise was gone! Bam!