Knee Plate Removal

[DJRhode]

Hello!

I own a 2009 Nissan Altima Coupe. It quit working on me Friday evening. Although I've had some other commitments to deal with, I've also been spending some time trying to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. Due to some financial circumstances, I'm reluctant to just have it towed to a garage if it's something I can do myself for less than $100.

The battery is fine, and the car has power. I recently had the clutch replaced, and I'm going to assume that the mechanics did a decent job on that. What I see when I try to start the car is that the car indicates that the clutch is not depressed, even when it is fully depressed. What this indicates to me is that the problem is with the clutch interlock switch.

As you guys probably know, there are two switches at the top of the clutch pedal. The slightly lower one is for the cruise control, and turns off the cruise control if you depress the clutch, while the higher one is the interlock switch, and won't let you start the car unless the clutch is depressed.

I want to get up in there, pull the plug out of the interlock switch and jump the circuit to see if I can start the car, which would be diagnostic for this situation. Then it would be a relatively cheap matter to order a new switch and fix it.

The problem is, I'm a pretty big guy, and I can only get one arm up into there, and I have had no luck getting the plugs out of the switches with one hand. They've been in there for sixteen years, and they are pretty stiff. Visibility is bad, even though I did take the cover off the fuse box and jam a flashlight in there, and honestly, being in that position triggers my claustrophobia, so it's a very frustrating situation.

I'm thinking that if I could get the knee plate off, that would help quite a lot with visibility and access, and I might stand a chance of completing this repair myself. I just haven't had a lot of luck in finding good instructions on how to do that. I've found a couple of videos that kind of gloss over removing the knee plate on the way to removing other parts of the dashboard, but they are not necessarily for the same model car as I have, nor do they really provide clear details on this step.

If anyone here could point me toward better resources, I would appreciate it!

Thank you!

[VStar650CL]

The knee plates are just four 10mm screws once you remove the lower dash. See the diagram on IP-11 here:
https://www.nicoclub.com/service-manual ... 9%2FIP.pdf

The lower dash is easy, you pop the dash end cover (4 in the diagram, pries loose), pop the fusebox cover, remove one phillips screw behind the cover. The rest is pawls.

[DJRhode]

Thank you for the response!

I have actually had some success. I think my main point of confusion was that I was being led to expect a screw on the lower right near the central column, which was not present on my car. Anyway, I plugged on ahead regardless, got the knee plate off, was able to finally reach the clutch interlock switch, pulled the plug, jumped the circuit, got the car started. The cruise control switch works, and it's the same part, so I'm going to swap that out so I can drive my car now. I can wait on having cruise control until I get a replacement switch!