NOT HAPPY.... But New Parts Make Everything OK

Long time readers will recall an incident from last year, when a water hose feeding the OEM oil cooler burst, leaking coolant everywhere, causing lots of white smoke to emanate from the engine bay, scaring me into pulling over at the side of the expressway, and calling for a flatbed truck to haul me to Mine's. See below for the two water hoses feeding the oil cooler (underlined in red).



Here is the link to that post. And here is a close-up of what burst:


As I explained in that post, even though I'm thrilled with the craftsmanship of the Mine's engine, and the performance nature of the custom VX-ROM, I've had several issues with some engine peripherals since the installation... a leaking water line, turbo oil lines breaking twice, and now this burst hose.

Also in that post and also in the conclusion, I hinted at some "goodies" that ended up not getting installed.

But it was all ok, Mine's got the car fixed and everything seemed to be fine.

However, when Nissan Prince was getting ready to install the GETRAG kit, they found this (and again, apologies for poor photo quality, I had to scan in the print-outs Nissan Prince gave me):

Surface rust only perhaps, but still ugly.

The engine starter, covered with surface rust.  And the rust was coming from above, right where Mine's had replaced that leaking hose. Hmm. Not happy - why?

Well, take a look:

Red arrow is the hose Mine's replaced

But it's THIS hose that's leaking now!

Now, while my car never had any problems when I turned the ignition key and the engine would crank over, the mechanics were worried that, eventually, if the coolant dripped more and the rust spread, then there could be a detrimental effect and the starter "might go bad." Sure, sure, whatever. BUT, to me this was a legitimate reason to replace the starter with a new (or in this case, a rebuilt one). A new one was crazy expensive but a rebuilt was less than $200 if I recall correctly, so I had them install one while the transmission was lowered and that area was easily accessible.

And, I figured this would finally be my chance to install this:

Full SAMCO heater hose kit.

I had actually ordered, and obtained, this SAMCO heater hose kit in BLACK from my friend Wouter, in order to go for a stealthy look in the engine bay. However, with the car at Nissan, while I could have mailed in those black hoses, I simply asked Nissan to get and install what they had in stock, which were the normal blue set (reordering a black set would take a few weeks - from overseas - and I was too busy at work to send in mine) in order to get the main job of the transmission swap done ASAP.

So, now the underside looks like this:

Uh, wait a second, that's not exactly what I had in mind...

So I was under the impression that this heater hose kit, replaced the two hoses that had leaked. Apparently not (the mechanics had called me and told me this, but I figured might as well replaced everything that is old and likely to burst anyway).  So, eventually I will have to find some silicon hoses to replace these going into the OEM heat exchange.

In the meantime, I'm happy to report that the car now starts up like a motorcycle - i.e. very little resistance, it just fires up very quickly.  So in addition to the 6 speed, the car now start up like new and has some blue bling where most people will never see it.