Nissan Crew Truck Part II - Full Size Trail Ride from Colorado

The word today, innovation.

And in this edition of Xtreme 4x4, we found it with internal bead locks, high clearance portal axles and other ways to turn your truck hardcore while keeping it street legal. Plus, we'll see how only the big dogs make it this far north four wheeling at the frost line.

That and more right now on Xtreme 4x4.

Welcome to the extreme shop where today we're jumping back on our Nissan Pathfinder project, a vehicle that we're turning to the ultimate crew rig. You see the guys who work, turning this, what we do in the shop into a TV show are sick and tired of having to haul all that gear through the woods and up on trail when we're out on the trail ride. So by the end of the day that Nissan will be a capable comfortable and most importantly, street legal four by four. What do you think, Matt? You excited about your truck? I think it looks great and I'd like to say you look taller in person. Well, see Chris is short and Jesse's shorter makes me look big. Oh,

yeah, that's how it works.

Our Nissan view finder

came to us as a broken down pathfinder with a bad engine,

we tore it down and gave the 3 L motor a top to bottom inspection to see what kind of damage the broken timing belt had done.

In the end. We installed a new long block from our local o'reilly Auto Park

and then we took it out for a little time on the trail.

The truck honestly did a pretty good job in stocks farm out in the woods.

It also crawled halfway through a good pile of mud before it needed a little winch assistance.

Now, I'm sure some of you guys thought that this truck may have been finished. Well, it's not, there is no way we're gonna let the extreme crew roll around in basically a stock SUV. So we're gonna start with a brand new A RB bumper.

The stock Nissan bumper would be fine on a pathfinder that spent its days delivering kids to soccer practice.

But our new A RV steel bumper is made from 316 inch plate

that's been CNC bent cut and then fully welded. Plus it's pre drilled for all popular winches and has locations for off road lights. Good.

Now, just because this truck's main purpose is to haul gear and stuff for the camera crew to the trails doesn't mean that occasionally we're not going to call it into action to help pull out one of our trail trucks when it's stuck or worse broken. So, inside the a RB bumper. We went ahead and installed a Warren XD 9000 winch. Now, this is one of Warren's oldest winches. So it has years of testing in the field, has 100 and 56 to 1 planetary gear set and has 100 ft of 5/16 cable with a rated single line pole of 9000 pounds. Now, that's not the only warn tool we're going to install in this truck.

Now, there is no question that having an air compressor in the back of your truck is pretty handy when you're out on the trail. Especially, not only can we run air tools, but we can air up our tires after a day of wheeling to drive home on the highway. So we're going to go ahead and install this Warren VTC air compressor in the back of the Pathfinder. It's a V twin design and puts out the same amount of cubic feet of air as a home compressor would in your shop, but just in a smaller package. So the crew guys don't have to worry about a steal any space for our tools.

I got a whole drawer,

but when space on the inside does become an issue, the crew can load up this defender roof rack. We got from off road unlimited.

It's a 2

m steel rack made from 16 gauge steel and using their universal roof mounting system, you can make this rack fit almost any truck.

Now, obviously it can be said that a stock suspension on a vehicle will really limit its performance off road. You just can't fit a decent size tire underneath.

And I'm sure most of you have figured out by now based on the amount of stuff we've cut off the front of this truck, we're gonna be doing a solid axle swap to give us more articulation when we're in the woods

and then

this is where we have to make a decision. We don't want to run a tire that's too small on that new axle or it'll really limit our ground clearance. At the same time, we don't want to run a tire that is too big or we're not gonna be able to drive the truck on the street.

So we're going to spend some time right now, setting the truck up at a good height and planning our suspension lift from there

considering that this truck will be driven on the streets. We don't want it too high

with a relatively small tire. The truck will sit at a good height,

but we may have to sacrifice ground clearance.

If we put on a very large tire, we'll get lots of ground clearance on our axle, but the truck will be about 8 ft in the air that'll make it unstable and unsafe when it's on the trail.

Now, this is a problem that a lot of you guys probably face at home when you're trying to put together a truck like we are with this pathfinder kind of an expedition type of truck that sees a lot of highway and a lot of trails. But we had a little trick up our sleeve that's gonna help us out. We're gonna be able to set a rocker at about 25 inches, which is a good height. We're gonna be able to fit a 37 inch tall tire, but we're gonna get the ground clearance of having about a 44 on there. And to do that, we're gonna use a set of portal axles

coming up. Rolling on 40 twos is a must. If you want to run with the big blazers Rocky Mountain trail riding with the Colorado K five Club. When Xtreme 4x4 continues,

we're back on Xtreme 4x4 where the term go big or go home is more than just a redneck mission statement, especially for our friends in the Colorado K five Club.

Hundreds of off road trails litter the Colorado Rockies,

but none is more popular than the Holy Cross City Trail. It's a great trail all around, good scenery and good four

wheeling ascending 4000 ft through the big rocks and river crossings. This is Colorado four wheeling right here for most

coal is 11,000 ft and the Holy Cross City ghost town. This is nice up here. Very nice. You see forever. You know, you get up on top of some of this stuff you swear you can see can.

After taking in the sights, the Colorado K Five Club powered on to Cleveland Rock, you're gonna see a lot of action

at 11,500 ft. A lot of people don't even know. It's, er, they won't come up this far because of that. This collection of rocks, punish those that attempt it. Cleveland Rock is the hardest and most complicated obstacle on this trail. There are two lines up the rock and neither are for nudes

above

that.

You're probably going to see a lot of some tire

go on with this one. It's going to be wet and muddy. There's a lot of rubble on the right hand side and it's a good thing, those winch anchors will probably end up needing them for a few vehicles considered the highest obstacle in the world we border right up against wilderness area. So

vehicle travel isn't allowed any farther than this failure. Here is not an option. If your vehicle becomes immobile, then somebody's got go all the way back down there and all the way back up to the top. So no place to break, facing down the consequences. This club built their rigs to survive these alpine trails. We're a group of pretty hardcore vehicles on 42 inch tires and fully locked up low gears and good drivers and lesser equipped vehicles. We'd spend most of the day getting to this site

in these vehicles. It's lunchtime and we're here.

Steven Watson grew up Wheeland, Colorado Rockies. I don't feel hemmed in by the mountains.

It, uh, it actually sets you free making his living, designing and building hardcore full sizes. Let's face it. If you want to push the big tires, you're swapping one ton axles into a Jeep.

And we just like to start out having a man

over the years. He's become obsessed with conquering Cleveland Rock. I've had to build and modify and change things around to get to where I can get up it and it's still not a guaranteed thing.

His Dragon Slayer is an 85 highly modified crew cab. The drive train was really dictated by the tire size. We knew we wanted to run a 40 inch tire

and to do that

needed the one ton axles, heavy transfer case, heavy transmission and heavy drive shafts to push it all. We knew we were going to need some good power. So it's running a 454 big block then for suspension to get the flexibility required, we use a 14 inch travel coil over along with all of our steering components and a hydraulic assist

to be able to turn the 40 inch tires wherever we need to a two year work in progress. But it seems like every time you bring them out, you find a weak point or something that you want to fix or change. Steven stopped counting the coin in his pursuit of the ultimate Cleveland Rock. Conqueror, you know, Pro

Molly axle shafts, you got to have them, you know, dual transfer cases and heavy transmissions. They do cost some money. It's all part of the game.

You got to have it and be able to do it on this run. His father had the honor of taking the rig up the rock. I've never been there. I guess it's pretty tough.

Testament to his son's building ability.

James became one of the few to triumph over Cleveland Rock. It worked out real well. The tires just did awesome. And of course, the suspension was keeping them on the ground, so it did do the work.

And I was really pleased with the way it came up there while all come here expecting glory. I'm confident that they ever clean around.

B

will be here in defeat.

Clutch linkage fell out.

But all never regret taking on Cleveland Rock. That was a uh challenging obstacle. Um Probably one of the hardest I think I've done these rocks, didn't scare me off. I'm not afraid of the mountains.

I'll be back. Definitely.

Now, all in all a great day out on the mountain. A couple trucks needed to get towed back down to the bottom that's expected on any day wheeling.

And I know our camera crew was pretty wore out after spending the day above 11,000 ft. I mean, you know, from California, you know, sea level boys,

welcome back to Xtreme 4x4 where we're right in the middle of swapping a solid axle underneath the front of our project Nissan Pathfinder. Now, there are a lot of different ways to set up custom suspension underneath the truck once you have all the ifs parts cut off, but considering that this truck is going to be driven by a lot of different people

and spend most of its time on the highway we chose for a complete leaf spring solid axle swap kit from the guys over at CAL mini.

Now CAL Mini

have been the go to guys for Nissan off road parts for years. So we knew that our kit would come with everything we needed to put an axle underneath the front of our truck.

It all starts with a new front cross member that we're gonna modify slightly to work with our A RB bumper

for now,

the leaf spring pockets will be tacked to the side plates of the bumper using the existing cross tubes as the new front cross member.

The kit comes with templates to cut the holes for the swing shackle once in place, we can cut the inside and outside of the frame rails with the torque.

Then the sleeves are placed into the frame for the swing shackle bushings.

So not only does this kit include everything we need to do the solid axle swap. It also comes with new cross members and a heavy duty skid plate.

You have another boat,

he doesn't have his bow

tray.

Now, we're building our Nissan a little bit different than any other vehicle we've ever had here in Xtreme 4x4. Uh, that doesn't mean that there's not a lot of pathfinders out there, wheeling hardcore trails all the time. Ours is just being put together more like an expedition vehicle, which means it's gonna spend just as much time out on the highway and back roads as it is

in the woods and because of that suspension geometry is very important. Now, Nissan has a lot of time and engineering into the set up of their rear four

link. So we're really not going to change the mounting locations too much, but we will take these stock arms make them a lot stronger and of course, a little bit more flexi

with the rear trailing arms on the welding bench, we'll build a jig using 3 9/16 bolts.

The new arms are made from two pieces of 120 wall dum tubing sleeve together, making them a total of a quarter inch thick.

A poly bushing at one end

and a Q A one rod end at the other will give us good road manners, but more flex on the trail.

Ok.

The jig holds both the new arms in place during welding.

Then the new arms are installed back into the stock locations.

Now, we did the exact same thing with the stock track bar, we sleeved it for strength

and then we also added an adjustable rod end because the factory bar had no adjustment. This will simply help us align the rear axle when the lift is on the truck.

Now, even though we're gonna be changing this rear axle assembly, we want to reuse the original mount. So I went ahead and took some measurements from both the axle center line and the back of each backing plate plus the distance from the ground to each mount location.

Then once we cut the brackets off, we can weld them on our new axle assemblies.

Keep it tuned right here to Xtreme 4x4 because there's more coming up.

Now, we've been teasing you guys for the past half hour about the portal axles that we plan to put underneath this truck. And right now, we're mocking everything into place with our new portal box. Now, there are a bunch of vehicles that came from the factory with portal axles like the Unimog and the Hummer H one. But portal tech takes it a

that further offering a 100% new all aftermarket portal box that amount on almost any axle housing. Now, not only will it give us a 2 to 1 gear reduction in the box. It also raises the axle center line by just over four inches to give us more ground clearance when we're out on the trail

in order to make sure that our axles are built correctly. We're mocking everything in place and measuring the portal boxes, the pin location as

well as the offset of our wheels.

The wheel entire combination that we picked out for our crews. Pathfinder is all from DX CPAC.

It starts with their new DC, one black and silver aluminum wheel measuring 18 by nine inches and then we wrapped it in their new mud country tires measuring 37 by 13

five. Now, the unique three stage lug design will really help these tires tear into the dirt, but the alternating tread block design will help keep them quiet when it's out on the highway. Now, I know what a lot of you guys are thinking right now. Come on a solid axle swap, portal axles and no bead locks. Well, you're wrong.

Now, we all know that typical bead locks are illegal to run on the street. Now, I know a lot of guys do it and have no problems. One of the main things we're after with our pathfinder is to make it safe as well as legal. Now, the reason that normal bead locks are off highway use only is because when they make them, they cut the outer lip of the rim off and then weld on the clamping beat when they modify that rim, they void its dot

And therefore you can't use it on the street. Now, one version of street legal dot approved bead locks is the ST

internal bead lock that we're installing on the pathfinder. It uses an inner tube inside the wheel as well as the sleeve, when the inner tube is filled with air, it'll actually clamp both the inner and outer bead against the rim. And not only are they legal to run on the highway, but we also have the benefits of having a true dual locking bead lock on our truck both inside and out.

Now, the first step to install these is you have to take the tire and the rim down to the tire store, have them install the inner bead only then bring it back to your shop and then you have to wrestle everything onto the rim with a half mat on the tire. Now, since you can't really see how much work it is to get everything set up, I'm gonna go ahead and install this be lock on a rim, no tire.

The rim will need a 516 inch hole drilled into it for the valve stem of the tube.

Then we can slip the inner bead of the sleeve over the rim,

wrestle the tube into place

and finish it off with the outer bead and then fill it with air to seat the inner tube.

Now, obviously, this is being installed on here for demonstration purposes only just imagine that there's a tire on this rim.

Now, if everything mocked into place, you can really get an idea of just how wild our pathfinder finally looks. I'm going to go ahead and send the spec sheet off to the guys at portal tech and get our final axle assemblies into the shop for next time. And

right now, look at this thing, you know, all you Nissan guys out there who have been begging for a build up. I gotta say

that one is pretty extreme.