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12` Altima Coupe 3.5l M/T no spark no DTC`s after Transmission R&R

  • ptebo1
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7 years 6 months ago - 7 years 6 months ago #24096 by ptebo1
Hi. I was recently called out to finish a slave cylinder swap on a 2012 Nissan Altima, the previous Mechanic had removed ECM, air cleaner , battery tray, both front steering knuckles and axles, exhaust front pipe, all clutch slave cylinder piping , starter , and some other misc. bolts and brackets ( The Slave Cylinder lives in the bell housing so transmission must be removed)... Anyways. I finished the job and when i was done The car would not start. first checked for spark with an incandescent test light connected to ground with the pointy end about a 1/4 inch away from the spring inside the coil boot ( on all 3 of the front coils) and found no spark present. checked for dtc`s in all modules with verus scan tool and found 0 DTC`s in any module... engine rpm is present in data display. checked crank sensor signal with oscilloscope - peak detect on , 500 ms time base , 10 volt scale , red wire @ crank sensor and found a decent looking square wave just had a bunch of "noise" which I thought was odd because I was also using sensor ground for my ground. Soo I shotgunned a crank sensor at it anyways and still am having the same issue. One other interesting thing to note is sometimes the car seems like it "tries" to start so i connected an amp clamp around the ign. coil primary wire while probing the trigger wire with 2nd channel and every now and again (about twice in a ten second crank with peak detect on) it will actually fire... Also i have checked power and ground to the front 3 ignition coils and have also checked power and ground to the ecm. I have invested about 4 hours into trying to diagnose this no spark issue and I have absolutely no direction @ this point. The customer swears up and down it ran before the job and i believe him.. Also.. and i dont see how this is related but, the info display in the cluster is blank and customer swears it also worked... no dtc`s in ANY module. mileage display in cluster works.. MIL illuminates , No Theft light... I need some direction badly..
Last edit: 7 years 6 months ago by ptebo1. Reason: aaaa

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7 years 6 months ago #24114 by ptebo1
I went back to it today after sleeping on it and talking to some knowledgeable buddies at work. i popped a plate off of the oil pan where you would normally access the torque converter bolts on a automatic trans, which gave me a pretty good visual of the tone ring which is riveted to the flywheel. I spun the engine over with a ratchet on the crank pulley and i found a spot where it was bent. Then I spoke with the customer and asked him if the previous mechanic had attempted to actually remove the transmission from the top because when I got there all of the bell housing bolts were only a couple of threads in and only 1 was all the way in. The customer told me that the previous mechanic tried pretty hard to get the transmission out from the top twisting it prying etc.. Anyways, I straightened the tone ring out with a pry bar as best i could and the car fired right up. No leaks after test drive. I got paid for the job and the customer is happier than ever. Also by the way.. When I originally scoped it i was simply checking to see if a signal was present at all i never actually looked for repetition, I think I maybe could have caught this earlier in the game if I had captured the waveform on the 500ms time base and zoomed out on it. Would have been cool to pin-point the tone ring issue with a scope. I would have re-scoped it for repetition but since there is a decent access cover i decided to jump right into the visual inspection especially after talking with people at work and sleeping on it... Also the little display in the instrument cluster still doesent work, I dont have a theory on this other than for one the cluster is bad or needs repaired and two the battery went dead on us a few times so maybe that somehow caused an issue there.

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