3/6/11 - Day 2

Okay, so...I'm sure some of the people who would be reading this will have seen some real shadetree mechanic stuff, but I'm not sure if this has been done before...  Upon looking to take the computer out of the car, I found the driver's side door wouldn't open...and the passenger side wouldn't close.  So, we took the driver's side door panel off and played with it (After I crawled through the back hatch...the passenger door doesn't swing out far enough to open because we're leaving the body on the trailer for now.), and found the inside and outside door handles had to be pulled at the same time to open the driver's side door.  And as for the passenger side door...

...We decided this would be A-Okay...for now.

Today, we managed to lift the engine off of the trailer and move it into our shop, and took the valve-cover off to inspect the head.  The inside of the head was clean, no rust or big cracks either.  The cam didn't have any assembly lube for being previously rebuilt though, which seems kind of suspicious.

That thing was a bear to get inside!  It wouldn't mount to our engine stand...the bottom part of the block was too wide and the upper part was too narrow to bolt in place.  So we just left it on the lift and set most of the weight down on a homemade dolly.

Also, this morning I decided to try and look through some parts and clean small things while we wait to get the car titled so we can do big things.  I found out what this thing is:

It's basically a big MAF sensor.  Only, it's not called a MAF sensor, Nissan called it an "Air Flow Meter."  Here was the problem when I looked down the hole:

Yes, that is a dirt dauber nest.  I hate the little annoyances now.  Took a while to use a knife to pull all that dirt out, and it's still not quite clean.

There's no huge clumps of dirt anymore, but still could use a good cleaning.  The way this works, is that there's a trap door in the middle of the tube that's spring-loaded with a big coil spring in the housing.  When the throttle body opens to take in air, it makes a vacuum and pulls the trap door open, and the air flowing in from the air cleaner assembly holds it open for the sensor to read the temperature and flow rate and adjust the fuel injection output accordingly.  Pretty neat idea, for 1977.  The fuel injection still has two screws for tuning: One for A/F mixture, and the other for the idle speed adjustment.  Just like a carburetor set up!

So...I suppose it's a rather productive day.  Probably the only day I'll get the full day to work.  After getting the engine into our shop, it seemed like a good day to stop since it was almost 3:30 in the afternoon and it's a school night.