A couple months ago my 04 350z started making a ticking noise, which I believe to be some kind of valve lash. I took it into the Nissan dealer a couple weeks ago and they estimated 1700 dollars to fix the shims or something like that.

I was wondering if you guys think it would be worth it to do that costly of a repair on a car with 116k miles, or just not bother with it at all. It sounds pretty loud in person, but it doesn't really affect the driving of the car. It still has every bit of power and fuel economy it always had. It just sounds like crap.

Another thing is that my car also burns a lot of oil, even more so than most people i've seen with revups write about. It burns like 2-3 qts between oil change, which means I've been having to add a quart every couple weeks.

Hopefully you guys can give me your ideas on how you would handle the car, because I'm not really sure what the best option is financially, I could keep driving the car, sell it, fix this engine (but it would still probably burn fk ton of oil), or put a new engine in. Im hesitant to put a new engine in though because that would be several thousand dollars of work and an 04 w/ 116k only blue books for like 7k.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHFJ...ature=youtu.be

Thanks for any advice

 

This may sound dumb, but did you check the oil? You said it's burning it fast. The valvetrain might be bone dry

 

I check the oil level a couple times a week due to how quickly it burns, it's currently within normal levels, but the yeah i would think the valve lash is a result of oil getting too low at some point

 

So you need to rebuild your motor..../thread

 

The VQ has the cams directly actuate the valves so there nothing to easily adjust. You would need to take the cams off and shim the spacer between the valve spring and cam. I don't think it was somthing that was ever meant to be done.

I would say do nothing and run it until it breaks or put a used engin in. If you can do the labor yourself and you love the car and get a used motor with a warranty.

 

Our VQ engines have sized buckets (not shims),
the buckets do not sit on the valve springs, they sit on the valve
about $20 each but a lot of work to disassemble, measure and reassemble

If you run out of valve clearance you will loose compression, burn out exhaust valves, etc

The question is why is the noise so bad, does not normally happen

Given the engine is also burning (?) oil it may be cheaper to swap it out with a lower mileage engine

 

Thanks for the advice guys, at this point yeah I don't really see the point in trying to fix this cause from what I've read the job basically requires pulling the cams and timing chain.. Which id need the whole front end of the car off to do. I'm kinda confused as to how the bucket got so out of spec to the point where it ticks as badly as it does, as I've never really heard of anyone else having this issue