Captain Obvious

The typical donut spares are fully inflated when not in use. Pull 'em out and slap 'em on. And that's what I have with mine. Assuming mine has been holding air properly since the last time I looked at it, it should be ready to use without having to inflate it when I pull it out. And with the stock brakes, that was an option with the space saver spare that I bought from the junkyard. Right out of the yard with no mods, it fit OK on the back over the rear drum, but wouldn't clear the front calipers. So if I had a flat on the front, I could have pulled a rear wheel first and then moved that rear to the front. But the last thing I want to do when changing a wheel in an emergency situation is to have to do it twice. Along the side of a highway... once is bad enough. So for me, it was worth the extra effort and piece of mind to move the space saver rubber over to a different wheel that would fit on either front or rear.

I don't know, but the guy with the skull shirt looks like Jesse. I'm betting that Walt is in the camper cooking.

Haha!! Seriously though, that pan looks great. Way more effort than (even I think) necessary, but that's clearly how you roll.

Sorry for the delay. I haven't been on-line much over the past few days. Some details about my spare tire project... What I ended up using was a 115/70/14 tire from something in a junkyard. I don't remember what it came from, but it was probably a Nissan product. Older Sentra or Maxima probably. I bought it because it had the right 4x4.5 lug pattern. Problem was... I tried it on my car and it fit OK on the back but wouldn't clear the front calipers. So I took the tire off the space saver spare and had it remounted on the narrowest wheel I could find that had the correct offset and would clear the front calipers. The wheel I used came from an early (65) roadster) and it is four inches wide I didn't move the space saver tire over to the 280 original spare wheel because I was worried that the 280 spare wheel was too wide. The space saver tire was originally on a four inch wide rim and the original 280 spare wheel is five inches wide. I wasn't comfortable stretching that narrow tire out to a five inch wide rim. I think you could use a 4.5 inch wide rim, but since I was in there messing around anyway, I took the opportunity to make it as narrow as possible so I could drop the false wood floor down and gain some more cargo head-room back there. I ended up dropping the floor level about an inch-and-a-half.

@Av8ferg Working on it. I'm thinking with enough time, it won't suck.

Nice. I'd hit it.

Absolutely. Just don't get your hopes up for something awesome. I can definitely make something infinitely better than what you and I already have, but that's the only promise I'll make.

Thanks G. Haha!! I started messing around with it last night. About a half hour into it. I'm not expecting perfection, but I should be able to come up with something that will be a million times better than the non-existent labels I have now. In fact, (since it's a divide by zero error) anything I come up with will be INFINATELY better than what I have now! :

Can you take another pic of the label(s) with the lettering upright? Is there even a label on the front block?

Yup. Nice pic. That fits with the previous discussion about the 77 and 78's. You can see where someone wrote "REAR" on the 24020-N4701 block (the one for the headlights and EFI and ignition relay). And you can see the larger gauge R/W wire on the other 24020-N4700 block where the larger black link is installed.

Haha!!!

And there you have the difference between the man of few words... And me.

That's your "EGR Relay". It disables the EGR system and retards the ignition timing until the engine has warmed up enough to trip the water temperature switch. That relay and the water temp switch are both located on the wiring diagram in the lower left behind the headlight (kinda like where it is on the actual car). The EGR function portion is described on page EC-16 of the manual and the ignition portion is described on page EE-27.

I did some analysis of my old red links. I have no idea if they are factory originals or not, but they sure look old enough that they could be. With that in mind... The insulation OD is 2.8mm (.110 inch), which does NOT fit cleanly into the Yazaki datasheet. There are five strands of wire inside the insulation. Each strand measures approx .28mm diameter ( 0.11 inches ). If you do the math... Each strand has an area of approx .062mm sq and five of those all together is 0.31mm cross sectional area. So it appears to me that the old red links are pretty much the same cross sectional area as the new brown links. The insulation diameter is different, but the conductor cross sectional area seems right.

If I get a chance, I'll pull my EFI link out again and measure the OD. If all the theorization holds true, it should be about 3.0mm OD on the outside if the insulation. On edit... Couldn't stand not knowing! Just pulled it and checked. My green EFI link is spot on 3.0 mm (0.120 in) diameter. Another data point to support the belief that it is a Yazaki FLWX 0.5 (0.56mm cross sectional diameter)

Hmmmm... I have no idea. I do know that different manufacturers are not bound to color conventions, so "green link" from one company may not be the same rating as a green link from another company. That also means the what used to be a green link from the factory on the Z could be electrically equivalent to a black link from a different manufacturer. And I have no idea where Bonzai is getting their materials from. Here's what I DO know... 1) Pretty much all of the electrical infrastructure (connectors, contacts, etc) came from either Yazaki, or AMP. You can find one or the other of those two logos on pretty much everything. 2) The fusible link colors and cross sectional areas listed in the FSM's line up exactly with Yazaki's datasheets. 3) The new fusible links purchased from Nissan have Yazaki's name and numbers on them. Those three facts have me convinced with a high degree of certainty that all the original links all came from Yazaki. And if that's true, then the green link is from the Yazaki FLWX series and is 0.56mm square in cross sectional area. So... Getting to the point (there is a point...). If that black link from Bonzai is 0.56 mm square, then it should be pretty much the same as the original green Yazaki link. But I have absolutely no idea if that's the case. Maybe Bonzai would answer some questions if asked?

So I snapped a couple more pics of the 75-77 fusible link for the EFI system. A little background... the 75-77 EFI system has it's own dedicated harness and the only connections it makes to anywhere else anywhere on the car is in one spot above the driver's knees where the EFI main relay is located. The 78 is a little different and has the EFI relays up in the engine compartment and I don't know if they use the same dedicated harness for 78. But for 75-77 inclusive, the EFI fusible link looks like this. Green in color and includes a thick plastic strand for strain relief (that's the white part).

No.

Thanks for that fresh pic. That's a good one to get a handle on the wire colors for 76. Even without putting a meter on your 76, I have high confidence that your labels are correct and the link colors shown on those labels would be appropriate. If you take the two link blocks on the 76 FSM diagram and swap the two, then the FSM matches up with the car. I think they did the first screw-up in 76 and then ported that mistake in the documentation to 77 and 78 as well. The two white wires on that front block are larger than the one side of all the other links, and that makes sense. Same as 77. Only difference is that in 77 they made the wire colors a little more straightforward and didn't do as much "color changing with splices" inside the harness. And thankful for that!

grannyknot, That thing you pictured below? I don't think that's the EFI fusible link. The fusible link for the EFI has connectors on both ends and one end plugs into what you show here while the other end plugs into a wire that leads to the EFI system. The only pic I currently have of the EFI link from my car is pretty crappy. I can tell you, however, that on my car it's green in color. So if one is to assume that all the fusible links came from Yazaki, then it would be the FLWX-0.5 green wire. Here's what I have. Note that it looks like there are actually two wires, but in fact, there is just one. The other white thing is a non-conducting plastic string between the two connectors. Presumably a strain relief so you don't yank on the fusible link itself:

About the 1976 stuff.... If you look closely at the wire colors and the diagrams, you can see that the 1976 stuff is all kinds of screwed up too. In this pic, from a very well kept unmolested 76, you can see that the front block has (at least) two W/R wires going to it, and the rear block has (at least) three: Some of the wire colors and positioning are confirmed by Zed Head's previous pic as well: So with that in mind... First thing that can be deduced? The 1976 color wiring diagram floating around out there is wrong. Here's the previous snippet that shows four white and four W/R wires going to the link blocks (like the 77), but the photos of actual cars clearly show different: The next thing that can be deduced is that the factory wiring diagram suffers from the same link block positioning issue that exists for 1977. If you trace the circuits and then compare them to the links on the cars, you'll see that they have the link positions wrong in the 1976 FSM. They have the blocks reversed on the FSM wiring diagram: The only thing that seems to have made life easier than the 77 owners is that the stickers on the links themselves seems to have been of better quality and lasted longer than the labels from 77 and 78. Maybe Datsun changed their label manufacturer and went to cheaper labels that didn't last as long. The other thing that made life easier for the 76 owners is that the creator of the color diagram for 1976 put the link COLORS in the correct geographical locations even though they are in the wrong ELECTRICAL locations on the diagram (did I say that right?)

Haha! Nice pic. I'm guessing it's Bigfoot. Maybe Bigfoot wearing a button down shirt because he's going out to a nice place for dinner with Ms. Bigfoot?

Thanks for the additional info Joseph. Relieved to hear that I had not been spreading incorrect info about the link positions. And I agree... I think either the color positions in the factory wiring diagrams was wrong from day one, or the workers on the assembly line put the link blocks in the wrong positions. But since we have seen the same positioning on five or six 77 and 78 cars, I think we can assume they were consistent. Are you going to create a new picture for your website, or are you just going to recommend that customers confirm the position of the largest R/W wire and tell them to put the black link there?

Wow. Never would have guessed! Cool!!

Hi @Joseph@TheZStore, Thanks for chiming in. I dug out my old 77 links and took a look at them as well. My findings are the same as yours... They are red, and they are thicker than the new brown links. I also believe they are from Yazaki, but are from the thicker FLWX series. The question remains "Why?", but I doubt we'll ever get to the bottom of that. So how about the link positioning? Did your stored 1978 have the thicker black link towards the front of the car, or was it located towards the battery? Also, were the original label stickers on the link blocks still legible? I'm especially curious as I've been the one championing the "Nissan screwed up the positions in the documentation" argument. I'd hate to find out that I screwed that up and have been propagating mistaken info in some way. Thanks again, and hoping you can add to the discussion.