Hey guys, so the max has been giving me some grief lately. Get your reading glasses out org this is going to be pretty descriptive

Ever since I bought the car, I suspect I've had a bad waterpump. The reservoir was always empty, and my radiator never had its coolant topped up. There were no noticeable leaks and my car never overheated.

I did check the oil by pulling the dipstick, oil didn't appear milky or anything.



Head Gasket Issue:

So when I start the car, I get a little white smoke. Not sure if its condensation but there is still smoke even after the car is fully warmed up. When I rev the car there is a little water that shoots out, and smoke shoots out for a second or two.

That leads me to think I have a bad head gasket, funny thing though, the car has never felt faster.

Water Pump & Misfire:

The previous owner claimed that he changed the water pump about 20k miles ago when he swapped the motor.

Now whenever I top up the coolant in the radiator, I get a nasty leak above the oil pan. I'm suspecting this is from the water pump weep hole. When the radiator is topped up, I get some misfiring at idle and under load at 2k rpm.

Once some of the coolant leaks out, the misfiring goes away and everything is fine. Just out of curiosity I pulled the all of the sparkplugs & coils one by one, and surprisingly the plugs in cyclinder 1,3,5 were fouled. They only have about 3k miles on them. (NGK coppers).

The plug in cylinder 5 had some sort of white powder on it, almost like chalk, not sure what that means.

I pulled each sparkplug one by one, and fired up the engine to see what would happen, and something weird happened. When I pulled the coil and plug from cylinder one the car idled really bad. It was idling at 250 rpms and the car felt like it was going to die. When I did the test for every other cylinder the car idled stronger in comparison at 1200 rpms.

That leads me to believe I have a bad head gasket as well, (lost compression?). The maxima isnt over heating and it pulls pretty hard. At a loss for what to do.

The body has 297 and the motor has about 120k. Any ideas on what I should do?


I also need new control arms but that's another issue, due to my ride height

 

Water is a by-product of combustion, noticed much more when it's cooler outside., seen as steam out the tail pipe and spits of water especially when you rev it up. Once the exhaust system is hot, cat up to temp etc it is much less noticeable, unless it's really really cold. A head gasket leak would blow heavy white smoke and smell sweet. It's not common for the VQ to blow a head gasket unless it's abused.

Do a compression test.
You have an external coolant leak if your seeing coolant above the oil pan. It's possible the pump install went wrong or did it ever happen?
Change or clean up the spark plugs, does the misfire go away?
A white plug indicates that cylinder is running lean. If the head gasket was leaking into the cylinder, that spark plug would be "steam cleaned" and appear to look new.
Test the coil packs.

 

Def a compression test. Surprising you're not seeing anything in the oil

 

Well compression test checked out. The motor is healthy, I guess.

The misfire is gone. I replaced the 3 of the plugs in the back. Surprised they went bad so quick. Front 3 spark plugs were still clean.

Now to address this water pump. For this part is it OEM all the way or would I be okay with aftermarket and OEM o-rings ?

 

OEM all the way, you only want to do the job once.