Nissan Xterra front hubs

Hi all,

was underneath my friend's girlfriend's Xterra just to see what there was to see... she's got over 200K miles on the thing and is considering whether or not to replace it as she just had to replace one of the cats to pass emissions inspection, which wasn't cheap. Anyway, the thing actually looks spectacular underneath, possibly even cleaner than my Jeep which only has 80K miles on it - if I hadn't seen the odometer I would have guessed similar mileage. Looks like a few seals are leaking but nothing that needs attention yet - unlike aforementioned Jeep which has already required a valve cover gasket and a rear pinion seal to keep it from marking its territory, and is still seeping from between the transmixer and xfer case... but I digress.

One thing that I noticed though, I grabbed ahold of the front driveshaft on the Xterra to evaluate play, and there's a decent amount of backlash in the front diff (much, much more than I would consider normal, but considering the mileage...) but even more alarming, there seems to be a lot of play in the front hub assemblies - that is, when the axle shaft rotates, the outer CV goes through a quarter revolution or more before coming to a stop in either direction.

Please tell me that these are automatic hubs and that this is normal before I mention this to her :) (there's no selector on them however like the more conventional 4x4s that I'm used to, and clearly the wheel hub is not directly locked to the axle shaft like on my Jeep - or if it is, there's something horribly horribly wrong.

I did attempt a cursory google, but I'm not sure what keywords will get me a summary of how the front wheel drive system works on an Xterra and I'm hoping someone might know off the top of his head.

thanks,

nate

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Nate Nagel
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