I *had* planned a nice day of putting ES swaybar bushings in my black car and helping Andy92RubyClassic paint his new pacesetter header, but I was given a little surprise when I went to move it... It didn't start - no click, nothing. Now I hadn't run it for almost a week, but I still wasn't expecting that. So I jump it with my Tracer, and it starts up fine - I pull the cables, and it dies right out. I figure I might as well swap the battery from the non-running white car and see if that helps - of course it didn't. I jump it again and let it charge off the Tracer for a bit longer this time, and test the voltage across the battery this time - 10v and falling, after a while it dies out again. Looks like I will be replacing the alternator - decidedly not part of the day's plan :(.

I went with the "pull the bolt out of the motor mount" method since it seemed like less work than removing the AC compressor or the water outlet. It came out easily enough that way, so off to autozone to get it tested. It put out 2 volts. Not good. So we price a new one - $200! Luckily I had a good one in the white car that I could swap over. Here's the interesting thing - the guy tells me that according to the computer, the alternator I brought in to test was from a 240sx! I figured maybe the previous owner had done this - lots of things on the car are sort of hacked up - but when I got home I saw that the alternator on the white car was identical, aside from being genuine nissan and not a crappy reman. Why am I not surprised to see yet another instance of parts stores' listings for the SE-R being completely wrong? :rolleyes:

So we get the alternator out of the white car pretty easily, and begin to swap it over. It won't fit on the pivot point on the black car. So I ground off a bit of the bushing on the backside with a dremel, and it slid right on. Got it all back together, belt tight, everything looked good - all that was left was to put the bolt back in the motor mount - sounds easy, huh? It wasn't. It took lots of jacking different points on the motor, wiggling it all around, etc to get that bolt back in. Finally got it in and threaded by just pounding with a 32oz hammer until it drove in :P.

Now we jumped it again, and tested the voltage once more - now it's 14 volts! Victory!! :D :cool:

I guess this is getting long. Sorry. Well, that was my day. Fun, huh? :rolleyes: At least now I have a car for tomorrow.

Looks like the ES bushings will have to wait :(.

Josh
'91 Black SE-R
'91 White SE-R

Josh--

Been there and done that, back in November. I feel for you. My motor mount bolt might *never* come back out after what I did to it that day. :)

Order up one of Andreas Miko's used alternators for $65, and you'll be good to go. He pulls them off low-mileage engines, and they are in great shape. I went that route, and the thing works like a champ.

Hang in there.

Ha.. Yeah since i didn't show up till 12:45 i knew we wouldn't exactly get a full day in of assorted repairs we had scheduled. It did feel good to take a non running SE-R, diagonose it and make it run within several hours.. After the horror stories i read on alternator changes in this forum, i think we did pretty well for not even planning the repair..

getting that motor mount bolt back in was a real pain... no one ever said you have to do a balancing act with 2 floor jacks. ha before that pulling the alternator out of the donor SE-R took a little liquid wrench and chiseling with a screw driver..

I have to change my motor mounts, should I try changing the alternator at the same time? The alternator is fine for now though?

Order up one of Andreas Miko's used alternators for $65, and you'll be good to go. He pulls them off low-mileage engines,
and they are in great shape.

Ha! I already thought of that, greg! I was telling andy the same thing. I won't need it until I am ready to do the head swap though. I couldn't believe autozone wanted $200 plus $80 core, and I would have to wait for it!

Yeah, nobody mentioned getting it back together was so much harder than getting it apart... we had the bad one out in 30 minutes, I figured the good one would go in just as smoothly:rolleyes: .

Josh
'91 SE-R x 2