Good morning,

I had to run an errand this morning, and thought that I would take the Z out and stretch its legs. When I stared it, there was a reasonably loud "tick - tick - tick" coming from the engine... it sounded like an old american V8 with hydraulic lifter trouble. The "ticking" continued until the car was warmed up a bit... a mile or two.

The car lives in the garage when not out playing... the temperature wasn't all that cold, probably over 40 degrees. The car was started yesterday and made no unusual sound at all.

I'm sure that the local Nissan dealer wouldn't be able to "duplicate the problem," so I will probably have to wait until it's a really big problem to be able to count on Nissan to be of any use at all.

This happened to anybody else?

Take care

Rob

 

My friends altima did this once. We could never figure out what happend.

 

My ticking turned out to be a bent rod.

 

how's your oil level?

 

Bent rod? Yikes!

Sure this is not the case with mine... ran (and sounded) great yesterday. Runs (and sounds) great every start up since that one start up this morning!

Oh yes, the oil level is perfect. By the way, the Z is a 2004.5 with 12,000 miles.

Maybe this morning's clattering was just a one-time deal (I wish, I wish)

 

Was probably just something in the vavle train that was stuck or being stubern.

 

Mine sounded and ran fine for a little bit , but hopefully its not a bent rod.

 

Geez, Rayden, stop scarring me!

 

Mine did the same thing this morning. what turned out to be the problom and how much was it to fix?

 

I heard the ticking noise when I started to move, but not during startup. Mine was ID'd easily by Nissan and was fixed in approx. 30 mins. by changing a few bolts on the driveshaft. Was it exactly at startup, or do you hear it when you start to move?

 

probably valvetrain noise. once the warm oil worked its way up there the sound goes away.

 

i just replaced 2 bent rods in my brothers 69 ss chevelle. You could hear the ticking speed up with the rise of the rpms and when we opened it up we noticed that 2 of the lifters where out of place and the rods were on the edge of breaking. Get it checked out if the noise continues

 

could be an some current arc in your coil pack. My last car had that problem, but a new coil pack fixed it. Basically the internal connections were gone, the current was jumping (arching) across connections and making that tick noise).

Get a mechanics stethascope (sp), pop the hood and start listening to find where the ticking is coming from. That will at least narrow it down substantially.