I, as many of you i've read about, have had the issue of pinging under light throttle. Since mine has been resolved, I figured I would post it up.


My radiator went out a little while ago, it started spraying out on the passenger side of the tank where it's crimped onto the aluminum. So of course, I go and replace it. I pulled it out and it's like a bird hit it. It was covered in fur basically the size of the fan. The A/C condensor seems fine, so it must have been pulled through and because the radiator is behind the condensor, was never washed off in the car wash.

I put the new radiator in, and made sure the coolant was good and bled--- now all is fine, super quiet at low RPM... and mine was getting so bad that on hot days you could feel the engine lose power when pinging.

I guess it was either running too hot due to inefficient radiator cooling, or I had some air bubbles around the coolant jackets. I did find also that when I would add oil (stupid 3.5L oil consumption), it would stop pinging for about a mile or two till, at least I assume, the new oil reached the same temp as the rest of the oil.

Hope this helps others!


2k3 Maxima 6MT
169k miles

 

Hope your headgaskets are gonna last another 50,000 miles since it seems you were doing quite alot of pinging....but were you overheating?

 

me too. I never overheated... it always stayed at the same spot on the temp gauge that it always has. I have noticed that under WOT when it pinged it would puff out a little bit of white smoke, but that was only at 6-6.5k rpm. So they may already be on their way out, but i'm not losing coolant and it's not mixing with oil.

 

Maybe you are not losing coolant or notice a mix of oil-coolant maybe because you have a tinny little leak in your head gaskets that it can be the source of that white smoke.

Just keep an eye in your oil and in your coolant level, if you found an anomaly change your head gaskets ASAP before you get a Huge problem with your engine.

 

For sure. I check fluids all the time because it's an oil burner

 

Interesting post. I also just replaced my radiator as it was leaking (160,000 miles) and noticed a similar big patch of hair/fur/crap on my radiator. It was the size of the fan as well.

Now that you mention it, I haven't noticed any type of knocking sound I usually get just below 2,000 rpm when light on the throttle. I've had the new radiator for about a month now.

This week will be hot in my area so I'll see how it behaves. My Max knocks more severely when running errands requiring hot re-starts.

 

^^^^ Sounds familiar. The car wouldn't ping at all till it warmed up, and once everything in the bay got heatsoaked it got much worse. I deliver pizza, so my engine bay is almost always heatsoaked at work.

 

welp, it was too good to be true. Driving around today and while I don't get pinging at low rpm on light throttle, I sure get it on WOT in high revs. Ugh, time to try coil packs/MAF sensor, unless you guys have some other cheaper things to try first?

 

My 2003 Maxima 156,000 is pinging real bad, I had an Alt problem and after new one things quited down. I thought it was the lack of electricity and the MAp and O2 sensors were working slow, Up stream O2's are new and I clean the MAP with the CRC cleaner. Map is expensive and I am putting it off. Since Alt was replaced when I start the engine the ALT light filckers quickly for the first second then off. Battery is strong per test. no codes, new plugs, 93 octane gas 100% Mobile. Any suggestions feel like engine is going to explode.

 

I found out that mine had a "ghost" code for the knock sensor. My Actron reader didn't show it, but the nice, snap-on reader the mechanic had did show it. I changed out the knock sensor, and voila! Nice and quiet. Of course I used all new IM gaskets.
Something else I did that was cheap and helped a lot before I changed out the KS, was to do the air compressor filter/catch can from the pcv. This helps a lot!