Nissan Repair: oil leak, negative battery cable, nissan altima

Question
Hello Von,
I have a 1995 nissan altima 4 cyl. Recently as a week ago it began to not want to start until eventually it would'nt start leaving me stranded. So I began to look for the problem and found the cause to my woes. There seems to be an oil leak around the distributor shaft which is leaking into the cap. This is causing the electronic plate inside the distributor to ground out thus causing it to die and not start. Now my question is were does the engine release the block pressure when running ? (note this model does'nt have the pcv valve) Also my check engine light is on and hasn't  gone out since this started how do you reset the check engine light on these models? thanks  for any help you can offer.   james

Answer
James,

There is a PCV even if it is not called this in the manual.  The pressure on the crankcase is vented to the intake stream and sucked away through the flow of air.  There is a check valve to prevent a backfire catching the oil on fire so you could look at it like a PCV.

The distributor will need to be replaced with a rebuild or get a rebuild kit and do it yourself.  I like the remanufactured route since there are som many opportunities to screw up parts inside the distributor.  I bought the last one from courtesynissan.com on-line and it worked great.  To reset the check engine light you could remove the negative battery cable for about five minutes and that should clear the code.  You could purchase a code reader/clearer for about $65 bucks from Checker or the like.