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Had an injector go bad 3 weeks ago in my '90tt. Since it was my second injector failure, I knew what it was immediately from the symptoms. I verified and determined which one it was by taking resistance readings from the harness at the ECU. I ordered a replacement from my local dealer and swapped in the new one (purple top with blue dot, Nissan part number 16600-40P07) the following weekend, using the Dremmel method. I got it done in an afternoon, there's no substitute for experience, and the car ran great in a test drive immediately after completing the job. However the next day the car ran like it still had a bad injector, except now I had a cloud of smoke in the rear view mirror each time I pulled away from a red light. I parked it until the next weekend. When I tried to start it to move it into the center of the garage to work on it I had to depress the gas pedal before it would fire, and I set off the smoke alarm in the garage. The ECU code was 55, and all the injectors tested OK at the harness. I pulled the injector connector for the one I replaced, and took off the cover. It appeared as though I may have got the half moon washer on top of the injector slightly askew when I installed it, but otherwise saw no obvious problem. I put everything back together, but when I then attempted to start the car I got a horrible noise and the engine seemed to not turn over. My next step was to put a charger on the battery for several hours, but that did not help. It occured to me that the noise was similar to a couple of years ago when the starter came loose and wasn't contacting the flywheel properly, so I got underneath and verified that the starter was still tight. I then pushed the car a few feet with my wife in it, and had her pop the clutch in second gear. My thinking was I wanted to get the engine turned over to catch a different tooth on the flywheel in case my previous starter problem chewed one off, and the car just happened to come to rest on that one. I was not able to get enough momemtum to get the engine to turn. I began to suspect a seized engine. This weekend I pulled the plugs and tried again to turn the engine over by pushing the car and popping the clutch, figuring it would be easier when not fighting engine compression. This time it turned over, but the top of the engine was covered by gasoline. After letting it evaporate off I stuffed paper towels in all the openings and repeated the pushing drill. The only paper towel wet with gas was the one in the cyclinder in which I had replaced the injector. So, what I think is going on is that the new injector stuck open, and while the car was sitting overnight all the gas drained from the fuel rail into that cylinder, eventually filling it up. Since liquid won't compress, that prevented the engine from turning over. My question now is, did I get a bad injector straight away or is there any possibility I could have damaged it somehow during installation? I should mention that I had a bit of trouble inserting the new injector. Trying to push it in by hand wasn't working for me, so I set the cover on it and tapped on the cover relatively gently a couple of times using a 6 inch half inch drive extension bar and a hammer. That wasn't working , so I ended up putting the two screws into the cover and alternately tightening them to push the injector home. Also, I dropped that stupid little half moon washer a couple of times, and experimented with trying to hold it position in the cover with a small dab of grease while placing the cover in position. I also gave the contacts on the injector connecter a decent cleaning with Radio Shack contact cleaner and a nylon brush, and packed some dielectric grease into the contacts before installing the connector. Does anyone see any major errors which could have damaged the injector, causing it to stick open?
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23:04:31 04/11/10
