Hello,
This is my first post, so be patient
It took me about 7.5 hours to do the work, but I am not a car handyman by any means. - I have not read all of the posts in this thread, but I wanted to report a few experiences and lesson learned that I got while doing this work. I spent the longest time in getting to center the floor jack to right spot, that eventually I nailed by interpreting the Nissan's manual Lifting Point diagrams, and going out to buy the extra 2 jack stands (it seemed that the entire town population had decided to raid the local Canadian Tire on Sunday afternoon).
1) The idea of putting the floor jack under the driver side reinforced rim, while could still be viable to protect the car it's discouraged widely because you shouldn't be leaving the car standing on the floor jack which is normally not intended to bear the weigh of the car for a long time. For this reason, and because I still need to exist for my family, I opted for the 2 jack stands at the front.
2) As per 1) - putting the jack stands for safety makes the operation of lifting/lowering the car more laborious. Considering that you have to find the lifting point, that at first glance isn't that easy.
3) On just the front stands the car is obviously in a very slanted position, hence the Reduction Gear oil won't be sitting properly when you drain it and when you fill it. This means, it will not drain fully and it won't allow you to fill it all with the mechanism described in the first post, as when you raise the car again to close the filling plug, the oil will gush from that opening when your remove the feeding tube, until you close it, reducing the amount of liquid you eventually get back in. For this reason I went out and bought another pair of 3 ton jack stands, lifted the back to level the car and worked the entire operation at once with the car on the four stands. This way you only have to lift the car once and it may possible to do the entire thing without even removing the wheel. The 3 Ton Jack stand were on sale ... how lucky!.
4) The frontal lifting point is not under the front aerodynamic protection sheet.... it's visible as something that looks like (from the distance) a nut on a bolt .. but instead it's just a small soldered stud. - I will try to add some pictures to describe this better.
5) The back lifting point is a bit awkward as it is basically the lower leg of the U shaped metal bar that links the two posterior wheels (note here the lack of technical terms, typical of a person with no mechanical background!) -
I used a garage floor jack, and jack stands for the first time. For the first time I replaced a liquid on the underside of a car. For the first time I also laid down flat under a 2 ton car on four stands... which looked a bit flimsy while under there (!) :shock:
The car seems to be shifting more nicely now.. but that could just be a placebo effect due to not wanting to have all this time spent for nothing. (LOL). - Thank you again to the guy that posted the series of pictures on the first post here, it was an inspiration.
I'll try to learn how to post picture... as I need to post pictures.