Hello all, my name is Rob and I am new to the forum. This is my first post. Sorry it is a question and islong winded, but I felt it best to give you as much information as I could.

My wife has an 05 (R51) Pathfinder with a VQ40DE motor which had the P0011 code and a camshaft rattle and very rough idle. I figured it was the tesioners and chain so I bought a kit from Rockauto and replaced the chains, guides and tensioners. It was a fairly involved job, took about 9 hours, but went fairly smoothly. I triple checked all the timing marks and buttoned it up. I changed the oil and filter while doing it.

It fired right up and the rattle and rough idle were gone. No SES.... all was right with the world. It ran good for a few days, then developed a intermittent stumble under load, it threw the SES light, so I checked the codes and had the P0011 and a P0340 code. I cleared them to see what would happen the intermittent stumble remained and the SES came back on.

It only happens occasionally, very hard to diagnose, but I will do the best I can. The stumble is under acceleration, when under a load, like right after an upshift or when more laden. It is very severe when it occurs, almost seems like it is stalling. Sometimes it will also throw the VDC off & SLIP lights on, they turn off when ignition is turned on-off.

What could cause this? Would replacing the camshaft position sensor resolve this issue? I tried searching before posting this but couldn`t find any mention of this issue, Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Rob

It's possible, but the only way to diagnose a code properly is to follow the service manual diagnostic steps to isolate the exact cause of the problem. That said, cam/crank sensors and variable timing control actuators have both been problematic on VQ-series engines and can sometimes be hard to figure out which one is the cause of a P0011 or P0021 trouble code. As far as the VDC/SLIP warning lights, when an engine management problem is detected, the vehicle stability control system is often disabled and those lights will be illuminated to alert the driver that the system is non-operational. Toyotas had this years ago and now Nissan has adopted it.