96 altima bucking and jerking

[racecar43]

i have a 96 altima the other morning it would crank but not start later in the day it started right up after driving it it started bucking and stalling sense it idles fine but when you give it gas sometimes it bucks like its miss firing i have checked fuel pressure it has good spark the only thing i found was the distributor has alot of oil in it could this be the problem

[Handyman2005]

It is the oil in the distributer. Remove the distributer, get some Electronics cleaner (aerosol) and spray ALL of rge inside of the distributor. You will notice a circular piece in the middle ,, that has many tiny slits in it that a optical sensor uses to send pulses to the ECM. These have to be srayed out very well. There is an O-Ring that needs to be replaced that will keep oil from enetring the distributor. They ARE available at a Nissan Dealer , usually less than 4 bucks,. Replace that o-ring, put it all back together and your jerking engine most likely will stop. If that doesn;t work, the distributor may quite possible be bad. I did this service to my '95 and it has been fine since.(About a year and a half now. My '95 has 201,000 miles on it and it is running fine....

[JoeShmoe]

Originally Posted by Handyman2005

It is the oil in the distributer. Remove the distributer, get some Electronics cleaner (aerosol) and spray ALL of rge inside of the distributor. You will notice a circular piece in the middle ,, that has many tiny slits in it that a optical sensor uses to send pulses to the ECM. These have to be srayed out very well. There is an O-Ring that needs to be replaced that will keep oil from enetring the distributor. They ARE available at a Nissan Dealer , usually less than 4 bucks,. Replace that o-ring, put it all back together and your jerking engine most likely will stop. If that doesn;t work, the distributor may quite possible be bad. I did this service to my '95 and it has been fine since.(About a year and a half now. My '95 has 201,000 miles on it and it is running fine....

Nice write up bro, if its that cheap I will also do my 95 this weekend. Anything specific to watch out for?

Racecar, clean out your EGR Valve with some WD40, then brake parts cleaner. Removing that buildup helps out a lot.

[kjones0601]

My daughters 96 altima had hesitation/misfire issues shortly after we bought the car, just off idle when warmed up it would try to stall. This is common on high mileage altimas due to carbon blocked egr passages. You can check for this by unplugging the egr. If the car runs fine with the egr unplugged then the ports are blocked with carbon. Having a couple blocked ports can cause too much egr flow to one or two cylinders, causing misifres or rough light throttle performance when warmed up. A year later the car developed severe bucking/stalling issues with 253k on it. I am relentless when chasing problems like this. I changed the cap, rotor, plugs, plug wires, swapped out the distributor with a scrapyard one, ran some fuel injector cleaner, tested the fuel injectors, tested the maf sensor, swapped the tps with a scrapyard one, etc. I eventually discovered an occasional double spark going to random cylinders by watching a timing light. Had to be ignition. There was no oil contamination in the distributor, but it turned out there was a film on the optical sensor itself on both of the distriubutors I had. I took a thin narrow piece of carboard (coke fridge pack cardboard) with lens cleaner cloth wrapped around it and carefully ran it through the space between the slotted wheel in the distributor and the sensor itself, thus cleaned the lens and the bucking problem completely disappeared. Problem solved !!!!!