R34 - Hicas Issues

[jrm]

Hiyas,

I've read and searched through the forum numerous times, but I'm unable to find anyone with the exact same situation I am with my HICAS - so I figured I'd try a post.

Back in July whilst driving between Adelaide and Melbourne - on the highway I would find that as my speed increased from about 60 that my steering wheel would start to roll to the right until it was quite turned by approximately 100. When I hit the 110kph stretch, the car lurched violently and the rear-end started wobbling crazily and settled down until my speed came back under 110. This was obviously a pretty crazy experience and not one i wanted to repeat. I had some intuition that it might be HICAS related, so I pulled over and ripped the HICAS fuse out. Sure enough - the steering was now dead straight and no craziness on the 110 marker (where I can only assume HICAS was turning itself off).

On returning from my trip to Melbourne, I took the car into a Nissan dealer who hooked my car up CONSULT and told me that apparently my car thought that when the wheel was at about a 60 degree angle to the right that the HICAS computer thought that the wheel was straight. As this Nissan dealership had no aligning equipment, he then proceeded to give me a written set of instructions to take to a wheel aligner to try and remedy this situation; Basically along the lines of:

a) Straighten steering wheel to 0 degrees as per CONSULT / HICAS (not too sure how an aligner is gonna do that without CONSULT?!)

b) Take steering wheel off and put it back on straight

c) Do something with steering rack to make the wheels straight as per the steering wheel

d) Get a complete wheel alignment to ensure everything is now spot on

Now this just seems nuts to me, and I honestly haven't had time to track down how I'm supposed to fix this. Right now I can either drive with the fuse in and find the car difficult to drive above about 60 or take the fuse out and find that the rear end is loose because there's no HICAS. I do have a CONSULT cable, but obviously none of the free software I can find seems to have any of the HICAS diagnostics. Some of the posts I've read seem to suggest the system should be 'auto-straightening' or something, so I'm not entirely sure here too. A few other posts I've read suggest you have to be very careful with removing the steering wheel otherwise you can potentially set off the air bag or make a light go on in the dash that you can't reset without going to see Nissan.

Anyways - any advice anyone can give on what the hell to do - I'd love to hear it. I'm sure I'm compromising my handling and probably my tyre wear by driving it as-is and I just want it fixed.

Please - no suggestions about rear-steering rack lock-bars - they would require engineering approval, etc and I get pulled over enough now without adding more woes if I get dragged in for an inspection or somesuch.

Jenna

[DECIM8]

Just a mention.. Why would a lock bar require engineering?

Secondly they dont have a hoist on the road, they will not note it is there... they care more for pods, strut braces and BOVs..

I dont think its true it would require a engineers ..

I have had a similar experence.. I doing 140 with bald tyres (bad alignment, weather and 2000km trip to qld caused this - to new tyres) when the ass end went out .. have not had an issue since I replaced the tyres and got a good alignment done perhaps this should be done first mine was way off!

Edited November 29, 2008 by DECIM8

[jrm]

Just a mention.. Why would a lock bar require engineering?

Secondly they dont have a hoist on the road, they will not note it is there... they care more for pods, strut braces and BOVs..

I dont think its true it would require a engineers ..

I have had a similar experence.. I doing 140 with bald tyres (bad alignment, weather and 2000km trip to qld caused this - to new tyres) when the ass end went out .. have not had an issue since I replaced the tyres and got a good alignment done perhaps this should be done first mine was way off!

From what I understand of South Australia (where I live), getting sent to Regency to have your car checked over is fairly common - especially when the car is obviously modified (mine is - lowered with bilsteins and 3" exhaust are the obvious ones). At that point, they're going to check over the entire car - see the HICAS lock-bars and tell me to fix/replace it - or ask me where the engineering certificate is.

I don't really feel like dealing with that situation, I'd rather just have the HICAS system working. I don't really drive on the track or hard enough to justify removing it for those reasons, and I actually find in 'normal' situations it helps with ease of driving than being a hindrance.

I'm kinda disappointed with anyone having any useful responses or caveats or *anything* on how I'm gonna go about lining up the front steering/wheel tyres without CONSULT or any issues related to removing the steering wheel with an airbag....

Jenna