Simon's new Xantia V6 and Leaf blog

[Mandrake]

Naughty and (hopefully) innocent gearboxes together for a photo…

I’ve actually got the new gearbox in already just going around torquing up bolts, refitting brackets etc.

Took far longer today finishing building the support horse than the actual gearbox swap bit.

The chain winch from above worked a treat.

[mickthemaverick]

Well done Simon, its coming on a treat!! Hopefully there will be no snags refitting the driveshafts etc and it will perform as expected!! Looking forward to the post mortem on the old box!!

[NewcastleFalcon]

Ditto from me Simon, your horse was a much more sturdy and stable beast, than the pic of the first piece against the wall

Regards Neil

[Michel]

What brilliant work! Well done sir, hugely impressive.

[Hell Razor5543]

Don't be surprised if you get a job offer from Nissan Electric Vehicles!

[Mandrake]

Ok, gearbox back in and everything else that was removed in the process apart from the driveshafts is back in.

Tomorrow the plan is to fit the driveshafts (including doing Nissan's CV joint outside face greasing ritual to try to remove the click that the car already had on torque direction change...) and reconnect the bottom of the hub.

I don't have the new bolts for the bottom balljoint yet so I can knock the ball joint locating pin into place in the hub but can't bolt it - although Nissan said the bolts should arrive on Monday so hopefully they phone and I can go pick them up. Once the driveshafts are in I can fill the gearbox oil and try running the motor backwards and forwards with the wheels still off the ground to confirm the noise is gone and that the replacement gearbox seems ok!

Swapping the gearbox itself didn't take me that long - under an hour from loosening the bolts of the old one to tightening the bolts of the new one. In contrast building the support frame for the chain lift took me about 2 hours, although that was partly because the heat was intense until the sun moved around the other side of the house so I had to keep stopping to go inside...

Interesting that the gearbox/motor mating instructions in the service manual say that 10-20g of grease should be injected into the void beyond the input spline in the gearbox - because both gearboxes had empty, shiny grease free voids and just a very light inconsequential wipe of grease on the splines! So from the factory they put hardly any grease in the input shafts... I've of course put the quoted amount in and gave both splines a healthy dose as well.

I'm also going to have to check the wheel alignment - so I'm either going to have to find and re-instate my DIY laser pointer wheel alignment measuring system which I haven't used in years, or get someone to check it for me.

Here's a few photos from today:

Quite a lot of room to work in the "motor bay" on the Leaf. There are only a couple of bolts at the top of the rear engine mount that are quite hard to get to, everything else is straight forward to access.

You missed all the fun today Richard, you could have added EV mechanic to your resume...

[NewcastleFalcon]

Once the driveshafts are in I can fill the gearbox oil and try running the motor backwards and forwards with the wheels still off the ground to confirm the noise is gone and that the replacement gearbox seems ok!

Will be an anxious moment, but the odds are very much in favour of it being successful, and the icing on the cake would be to solve the "driveshaft click" Achilles heel.

So the mechanical side looks nicely taken care of, is the electronic/ecu etc side just a question of plugging the connectors of the replacement box into the ones on the car and its all systems go, or is there some sort of updating required via a NIssan Connect tool or whatever they call it

I would also be interested in what settings are have to be recreated on connecting back up the 12v Battery. I never did get round to replacing my 12V battery, which after being used to an ICE car seemed a bit low at 12.2V, but it hasn't dropped off any further in the 12months or more since

REgards Neil

[Mandrake]

Once the driveshafts are in I can fill the gearbox oil and try running the motor backwards and forwards with the wheels still off the ground to confirm the noise is gone and that the replacement gearbox seems ok!

Will be an anxious moment, but the odds are very much in favour of it being successful, and the icing on the cake would be to solve the "driveshaft click" Achilles heel.

It all hinges on whether the 2nd hand gearbox I found for a reasonable price is indeed 9500 miles and was removed and stored carefully. If so I think everything should be fine. I'm feeling optimistic.

The CV click I'm not sure about - Nissan want you to use Molykote M-77 which is a a moly based paste rather than a grease, but at £40 for a 75g tube I won't be using that - there is some still on the driveshaft joint with no evidence that it really works. I'll just use some regular CV moly grease and see what happens, and if the click remains and annoys me enough then I'll consider using their bodge...

So the mechanical side looks nicely taken care of, is the electronic/ecu etc side just a question of plugging the connectors of the replacement box into the ones on the car and its all systems go, or is there some sort of updating required via a NIssan Connect tool or whatever they call it

I actually reconnected the traction battery and 12v battery yesterday to check things over including the parking actuator (but avoiding drive and reverse of course since there is no oil in the gearbox and no driveshafts attached) and I had managed to set several fault codes.

The main one was a code complaining about the park interlock not working - which will have been set when I removed the 40 amp fuse to disable the parking lock so I could shut the car down with the park lock disabled before removal.

Also the 12v battery drained down to nothing a few days ago (I believe due to that fuse being removed causing an ECU not to go to sleep) so that set a few other fault codes and the warning light was on the dashboard.

However I was able to use Leafspy Pro to check and clear all the fault codes and the warning has gone out now. For the price of an OBD-II adaptor and a £20 piece of software you can do basic fault code checking and resetting without paying big bucks for the official kit!

I would also be interested in what settings are have to be recreated on connecting back up the 12v Battery. I never did get round to replacing my 12V battery, which after being used to an ICE car seemed a bit low at 12.2V, but it hasn't dropped off any further in the 12months or more since

A few settings are lost when the 12v battery is removed, but probably not the ones you'd expect.

The charge timer / climate control timers are cleared and the preconditioning temperature reverts to the default 22C. A few of the settings in the Zero emissions screen get reset. The startup chime gets reset to the default (I normally have it off, now it's back on!) but that's about all I've noticed. The radio still has all its channels tuned and my bluetooth connections are still there.

So there's nothing that you can't reprogram in a few minutes lost by disconnecting the 12v battery (mine was off for several days) and there's no radio code to enter.

The recommended procedure to disconnect the battery is to have the car unlocked and turned off, open the bonnet, close all the doors and wait 5 minutes before removing the negative terminal so that ECU's have gone to sleep.

When you reconnect have the key fob handy in the car because the first time I reconnected it the alarm went off and I had to turn the car on to silence it. Strangely the second time the alarm didn't go off, although this time the battery was disconnected for days instead of a short time, perhaps that doesn't trigger the alarm.

[NewcastleFalcon]

Thanks Simon great information as usual

Regards Neil

[Mandrake]

Well she's back on the road!

Took her for what ended up being a 40 mile "test drive" and the gearbox is a goodun. Seems quiet and smooth, had it up to naughty speeds on the motorway to check there were no vibrations and everything seems fine.

So all I have left to do now is the wheel alignment. It actually feels exactly the same as before in terms of self centering so I don't think the toe in has shifted, (I wouldn't expect it to when I only disconnected the lower ball joint) however the steering wheel is slightly to the left to drive straight ahead, which I think it always has been.

Leafspy Pro can report the steering wheel angle sensor and when I turn the wheel until Leafspy says 0 degrees the wheel is exactly level - so the steering wheel on the column agrees with the sensor, which means the offset error is in the trackrod lengths, so I should be able to fix it by adjusting the trackrods without doing any sensor calibration. (Which is fortunate as Leafspy can't calibrate the steering wheel sensor - only show what it reports)

Hopefully I can dig out and adapt my laser alignment system to fit the Leaf - it was custom made to fit the Xantia although the Leaf is about the same size car so it should work.

Back to work tomorrow for some nice easy indoor work! I have more than enough tan now - I look like I've been on a tropical holiday and finally had to wear sunscreen today so I didn't go from "well tanned" to "burnt and peeling"...

[NewcastleFalcon]

Well she's back on the road!

Excellent, well done. A well-deserved relief for you I'm sure Simon. I have followed the blow by blow account with great interest.

At the start I posted that if you could take it on yourself, it would be more satisfying and cheaper, and as it turned out the various options ran out one by one, and it was the only option left

I think everyone who has followed the story has learned a lot from your efforts, and you yourself most of all overcoming the various problems thrown up.

I'd give it a decent treat at the weekend, take it somewhere scenic and do some "brochure shots" as some kind of celebration of a job well done

Regards Neil

PS Do you have any plans to do a further fluid change to give the replacement box a bit of a flush out?

[Mandrake]

PS Do you have any plans to do a further fluid change to give the replacement box a bit of a flush out?

Yes, because the gearbox is 2nd hand I plan to do an oil change after 1000 miles or so, so I can check the oil and plug magnets for any debris. It only takes 1.4 litres of oil so it's not too expensive.

[white exec]

A great result, all down to perseverance. Good decision to change the oil and inspect at 1k miles.

I think I followed most of it, but did you open up the old unit to see exactly what the clonking was, and where the fragments had come from?

[Mandrake]

A great result, all down to perseverance. Good decision to change the oil and inspect at 1k miles.

I think I followed most of it, but did you open up the old unit to see exactly what the clonking was, and where the fragments had come from?

Not yet, as I won't have the time for a couple of weeks due to catching up on other stuff that this repair has been taking time away from. But I will open it at some point. After that I'm not sure what to do with it as I won't want it cluttering my garage forever.

[xantia_v6]

You can probably sell the input shaft to someone who is installing a Leaf motor in a RWD car, as the motor splines are otherwise difficult to couple to a traditional gearbox.