Yahoo Autos Nissan Z: 3 Tales of Adventure and Intrigue
1. Smells Like Z Spirit
My 1985 Nissan 300ZX was running better than Mo Farah after a bowl of Wheaties. Everything seemed to be perfect, which is to say, much better than usual. It was a foggy 5 a.m. in Marquette, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, an unusually early beginning to a six-hour drive toward my parents' house for spring break.
An hour into my trip, I saw only the third or fourth other car on the road. Headlights filled my rearview mirror; player two had joined the game. Except player two was a tailgater, the annoying sort who lives unaware that headlights have adjustment screws. There was no traffic, every opportunity to pass, but they didn't do it.
Passing through the long straight section east of Shingleton, an "unincorporated community" only slightly larger than a crowd of people, there were endless rows of pine trees at either side, but no street lights. The Z's exhaust was still humming along nicely, and the Tenacious D I was listening to was just as metal as the guy tailgating me at 80 mph down an empty road. And then silence.
Car trouble wasn't anything new for me and was inevitable after spending $1500 on an old sports car from Craigslist. I wagered that any car repair during college would be financially devastating, so I bought a car I had already owned and repaired two of during high school to improve my odds. In hindsight, buying a car that didn't need to be repaired would've been better, but that sounded smart and boring.
My brain started to drown in what-ifs. Timing belt? Fuel pump? Satan? I signaled with my hazards and flashed the brakes as though to indicate: Hey, I need help. The car behind me continued to slow down as I coasted dead to the shoulder of the road, and I was feeling thankful that this jerk might end up being my savior. Instead, I heard only engine noise and exhaust as the driver flew right past me as my car crawled to a stop.
I stepped outside and saw the fog stuck between the trees like cobwebs. It was thick, dark, and beautiful. It occurred to me then that 90 percent of the bears in Michigan live in the U.P., and there I sat, stranded, like a spilled bowl of honey.
Obvious signs like oil or other fluids were missing, so I popped the hood and smelled that weird stink that electrical stuff makes when it burns. It was coming from the box of fusible links. Fusible links are like big fuses that connect major electrical components, and rather than burn your entire car to its valve stems, they sacrifice themselves in the event something goes wrong. The fusible link marked IGN for ignition was scorched like the last curly fry at the bottom of an Arby's container.
I started walking back toward Shingleton, hoping the next thing that I crossed paths with had really small teeth and hated the taste of people. I thought about the fact that everything from my dorm room was also stranded in the 300ZX: my Type 1 diabetes medical equipment. My clothes. My television. But most important, my PlayStation.
A vehicle was moving my way: a mid-'90s Pontiac Trans Sport. I reluctantly held my thumb out. It's a van that can accommodate up to seven people, but when you see one, you wonder if that's seven people in seats, or two columns of people stacked vertically.
It signaled and pulled over. I walked to the passenger side of the van and got in. My heart dropped.
There, atop the mini shelf on the dashboard of this creepy Pontiac van, sat a new-in-the-box fusible link from NAPA. "Dude, I need this," I told the guy before saying hello or explaining anything. The man piloting this portable-vacuum-shaped van told me he was an electrical engineering student from Michigan Tech University. I was, in a word, stoked.
He was not interested in my 300ZX at all. It could have been a DeLorean, for all he cared. He spent a few minutes scanning the engine bay, as I blabbed about the 3.0-liter V-6 being an interference engine, and the two Z's I had in high school, one of them turbo. Not even an "uh-huh." Then he said, "Oh, that's why." The previous owner had replaced the clutch fan, which would normally bolt to the water pump and cool the engine, with electric fans from a Ford Taurus. It's a common modification to the Z because Taurus parts are cheap. He showed me that the relay for the fans was wired backward, and this wire here needed to go to that tab there. He asked me: "Does the power switch for these ever get warm?" I said, "Oh yeah, all the time." Oh, that's why. Unfortunately, neither of us had a crimping tool or crimp terminals, which meant that fusible link he magically had was useless.
This fellow college student drove me 45 minutes in the opposite direction he was traveling, so we could wait 20 minutes for a parts store to open. We got what we needed and drove 45 minutes back to my stranded car to begin roadside repair. The crimping tool we purchased was junk and immediately bent out of shape on the first crimp attempt. So there we were, on the side of the roadway, using a rock and a hammer to crimp wires together. We also added an inline fuse between the relay and the fusible link to prevent this from ever happening again. Everything was beaten back together, and the car fired up.
