EDIT: Saga of the Silver Donkey aka Check your catalytic converters!

J Everett

Suspension Lift
Founding Member
Location
Houma, LA
Guys and gals, I need your help. I am helping a friend freshen up a 2006 that has sat up for a while. IT's missing the IPDM fusebox cover and we have no idea what fuses are what. I would go off of my 2012, but Nissan changed the IPDM somewhere around 2009.

Can anyone take a picture of the fuse layout diagram under the lid of their IPDM and post it here? Many thanks in advance!



EDIT: This thread ended up being about so much more than just the IPDM and the cover and diagram. Read on for quite the saga.
 
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Prime

Shut up Baby, I know it!
Admin
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Denver Adjacent
So... Problem.

The lid only has the relay layout that is not part of the IPDM. The actual IPDM has the fuse layout on it.

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So after the kids go to bed, I'll get put the FSM and find the 05-08 fuse layout.
 

J Everett

Suspension Lift
Founding Member
Location
Houma, LA
The FSM doesn't have the fuse layout. We looked. Neither does the Owner's Manual. And if it was on this IPDM (we have the early white one), then it was on a sticker that has gone missing. :/
 

J Everett

Suspension Lift
Founding Member
Location
Houma, LA
Oh, OK, we thought those were referring to pinouts on the connectors, but it makes sense that those circuits would match up to fuses as well. Thanks! I'm going to make a label based on this and stick it to the IPDM!
 

J Everett

Suspension Lift
Founding Member
Location
Houma, LA
I will update when we get this thing to fire. Currently waiting on new (to us) fuel rails and injectors. Previous owner was stealing gas from a neighbor and said neighbor got sick and tired of it so he started spiking the gas cans with water. We replaced the fuel pump and sending unit and emptied and cleaned the tank. Now we are getting 52lbs of fuel pressure, up from 11 with the old pump. Replaced stolen battery and discovered that the ECU will not trigger the starter if the A/T control unit fuse is missing from the fuse box in the glove box. That one took a while to figure out. Replaced all the plugs; the originals were still there with 170k miles on the clock. They were in terrible condition. Engine turns over and stutters, but won't fire enough to run and smooth out. We think the water in the tank and the six months or more that it sat up has the injectors rusted shut, so we're replacing them with units off a salvage truck. I hope to report good news by the end of the week.
 

J Everett

Suspension Lift
Founding Member
Location
Houma, LA
Sounds like quite an undertaking.

We're calling it the Silver Donkey, be cause it's been a stubborn pain in the ass.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the methhead previous owner also used the title as collateral for a $500 cash advance loan (probably to pay for meth) and then never made a single payment. So the kid who we are doing all the work for paid the loan off ($750) to get the title in the first place. So if we get it running after just what we've done + fuel rails and injectors, it will end up being a good deal.
 

J Everett

Suspension Lift
Founding Member
Location
Houma, LA
Well good news and bad.

The good: Turns out I have a blurry but somewhat readable photo in my Photobucket of the underside of the IPDM lid from my 08



The Silver Donkey has no missing fuses.

The bad: After replacing the fuel rail and injectors, we sorta got the thing to fire up, but it bucks and sputters and misfires its ass off. I got a P0300 code for multi cylinder misfire, and I'm pretty sure it's either the crank position sensor, cam position sensors, or all three. When time allows, we will pull all three and bench test them. Also gonna pull the covers off the variable valve timing actuator and make sure they're not all sludged up. Making progress, but not as quick as we'd like.
 

J Everett

Suspension Lift
Founding Member
Location
Houma, LA
We're getting no ignition on bank one at all. Today, following the diagnostic procedure in the FSM, we checked and then rechecked continuity on every single wire in the engine harness, bench tested all six coils and both cam position sensors. Everything checked out good. Got to thinking about when all the IPDMs were failing and decide to take it apart. There are some light brown hotspots on the circuit board, but none of the components appear to have let the smoke out. That said, once I opened the housing, there was a distinct ozone smell. I'm heading to Pull-a-Part tomorrow to see if one of the two Frontiers there still has an IPDM in it. May pull the ECM as well if the price is right.
 
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J Everett

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Founding Member
Location
Houma, LA
Didn't find much at PullAPart. There were two 2nd gen frontiers, both arrived on the yard in January and both very much picked clean. No same gen Xterras or Pathfinders, so no IPDM. We bought one off eBay instead. Fingers crossed.
 
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J Everett

Suspension Lift
Founding Member
Location
Houma, LA
Replaced IPDM and got truck to fire on all 6 for about 30 seconds. Read on another forum about a Pathfinder that required a full engine replacement because a pre-cat dislodged all its guts into the secondary catalytic converter and blocked it up, causing too much backpressure in one cylinder bank. The back pressure caused the rings to expand to the point that they scored the cylinder wall requiring a rebuild or replacement. So we pulled the cats. Sure enough, same thing. There was nothing in the pre-cat. As soon as the pipe was out, the engine fired right up and settled down into an even idle at ~800 rpm. So we know now that was our biggest problem. Cats have been replaced, but the damage is done. We have what sounds like a rod or wrist pin knock.

I don't know if we're going to keep going and find and fix the source of the knock, or if we're going to quiet it down with Marvel or similar and limp it into a used car lot and trade it for something. That may just land us with a whole other set of problems.

Anyway, I hope someone having the same issue runs across this thread. Maybe it will help them. If you have backfires through the intake, and one whole cylinder bank dead, pull the catalytic converters on that bank. That's the source of your issues.
 
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J Everett

Suspension Lift
Founding Member
Location
Houma, LA
Well, well. Cat failure strikes again. Another Xterra, this time my friend George's, started running ragged and flashing the CEL. Codes were:

P0305 Misfire, cylinder 5 x 2
P0300 Random misfire, Bank 1
P0420 Catalytic system efficiency below threshhold x 2

First things first, pulled the first O2 sensor on the passenger side to create an exhaust leak before the cats and it smoothed out. So we put the borescop down into the cat and sure enough it was starting to break up. Replaced primary and secondary cat pipes with parts from rockauto.com (about $250 shipped, waaay les than Advance, AZ, O'Reilly, or Nissan) but still had a misfire on cylinder 5. Turns out the spark was arcing out to the block through a gap in the insulating boot from the coil to the plug. Replaced it with an AC Delco part ($8 or $12 from AZ, can't remember) and a new plug. We'll change out the others shortly but we were in a rush to get him back on the road so he could go to work. The AC Delco boot has insulating epoxy in the exact joint it was arcing out, so it is a better part than the stock item. I am about to change all of mine plus the plugs soon. Seems like good insurance. Especially since I'm now starting to think that the misfire is causing the cat failure instead of the other way around. Unburned fuel igniting on hot catalytic matrix, boosting it beyond it's temp threshold, over and over.
 

J Everett

Suspension Lift
Founding Member
Location
Houma, LA
No es bueno.

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