96 Nissan D21 Hardbody/Sani - South Africa

Tapatalk been giving me problems getting onto the site.

Here is part two...

Here is South Africa, Nissan added a coil over second shock on the front to hold up the 2.7TD motor that was too heavy for the standard torsion syspension and was inclined to nose dive.

But the D21 was known internationally to have a rubbish front suspension if you started doing anything to help you off road.

I went to 31" wheels and lifted 35mm, and all hell broke loose. Ball joints and tie rods would have to be replaced every three months.

But all this was still worth it to me. The Hardbody is fun and has been more than capable for what I was wanting to do.

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First two years I had her, we never broke anything and was out in the bush very second to third weekend.

Then in March 2008 we drowned her. Insurance wrote her off, but I took the money and replaced the engine and still walked away with nearly half the money they paid out.

With the KL71 tyres, we could really push her, and some of the plastic bits started suffering.

Nomber 2014 I pushed just a little too hard on rubber that was not up to the task, and with a too much momentum, I managed to bend the front end so bad, that the insurance company wrote her off again.

This time I was with the wrong insurance company, and only way I could keep my Hardbody, was too withdraw the claim and pick up the costs myself.

I have been unemployed for nearly three years, so the fix and rebuild has been a slow one.

What has been bent on the front suspension, no one can figure. We stripped everything down and attempted measuring evrything to compare left and right side. Evrything seems perfect.

But the right side upper control arm can not adjust the camber enough. With three times the shims and longer bolts, it's still more than two degrees from the specification camber.

So if you can't fix the IFS, you cut it all out and start over and build a new suspension.

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Now the last two years has probably been the most exiting and frustrating time for me with the Hardbody.

There was other build projects planned, but to rescue the Hardbody, and get my daily driver back on the road, has taken up all my time and budget.

Offroad club freinds here have helped out with spares and even money and lots of advise to fix the Hardbody.

We started off looking at our options, and managed to get our hands on this running Safari/MQ Patrol for cheaper than second hand spares shopz were wanting for a Dana Jeep diff for the front end.

Plan was to get a Dana diff and then regear to the Hardbody ratio. But with this Patrol, it opened up a lot of opportunity and added some headaches.

Hardbody and Jeep have left hand drop prop shaft, but the Patrol was on the right.

The Patrol however has a divorced transfer case, and the idea immediately came up to give the Hardbody a second TC and crawler gears.

The Hardbody and Patrol has identical wheel base and track, so it should be fairly easy, and the Patrol had serious diffs compared to any Dana diffs I could have used.

Right now, we still only have rear wheel drive, but we have a solid axle in the front. The Hardbody still does duty every day, but we have ended up with a 200mm lift and now running 33" rubber compared to the 31s we had on before.

So it still looks like any Hardbody, well not when you compare it to something else.

Here she is next to a Pajero to measurr up.

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Ok, time for a break and see if you guys even want to hear more about my baby.

I keep saying her, and my baby, but the Hardbody has been named Hillbilly, and the past few months people are suddenly calling my baby a HIM.

If you guys want more details, I have lots to tell about this build.

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Thanks for the positive reply. I will continue later at home.

I have one problem in that I can only log onto the forum from my phone through Tapatalk. with my computer I get invalid login detail or user.

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So what makes my Hardbody different, is the SFA. Unlike the USA and a few other countries, we have no kits available that make this conversion a bolt on.

Searching forums and clubs, I can only find around five other conversions like this in our country.

To bring a bolt in kit from the USA costs more than the Hardbody is worth, and for an unemployed person, totally impossible.

In the USA, the guys all go for the Jeep Dana 35 diff, and then re gear and use adapters to convert the bolt pattern on the wheels to the five bolt of the Dana. Or they just run different wheels front and rear.

As cheap as I do things, this was not going to work for me.

I originally planned a front and rear diff swop to Dana to get around this problem. I would also be assured of perfectly matched ratio front and rear.

But again, to get matching diffs, and then regear to my 4.88 ratio, was just too expensive.

I also found many youtube videos where guys were breaking Dana 35 diffs offroad. The universal in the knuckle seemed to be a bit week, as well as side shafts.

I then looked at Toyota diffs. Some even had the ratio I was needing, but they have a narrow track.

I would need to run 50-75mm spacers to get the front and rear wheels to run the same track width.

Then this came along at an excellent price.

The Patrol/Safari has identical track and wheel base as the Hardbody.

We could not let this one pass as the entire vehicle in running condition, was cheaper than what a Dana diff would have cost.

I purchased with the idea that if it did not help with the project, I could add it to my list of projects. Maybe end up with a descent 4x4, or just sell off the spares and make some money.

First problem I had, was that the Patrol was 1500km away from home. Someone from our 4x4 club checked it out for me and did the purchase and moved it to his farm for me to pick up later.

This person already has about twelve Nissans on his farm, four of them are Patrols, so he was able to give me a lot of information as we went.

The first option was to just do a straight body swop onto the Patrol chassis.

But I wanted my 2,7TD engine and not the L28 of the Patrol.

Patrol chassis is 300mm longer at tge front bumper, and the the gearbox of the TD27 and Patrol transfer case was just not coming together.

There were some other factors we did not even know would be a problem untill much later, like the sump that would have been in the way of the front diff.

But we decided to scrap that idea, because I saw another oppertunity to do something even more unique.

To be continued......

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My unique idea I had for the Hardbody is this.....

The Patrol we got, has its diffs on the right for both front and rear. To move the propshafts over to the right, I would use the Patrol divorced transfer case behind my gearbox and transfer.

This would also give me additional doubled low range gearing to a 4.18 compared to the 2.1 of the Hardbody.

I like doing things slow off road, so I really liked this idea.

The Patrol front diff is the C200 and is exactly what the Hardbody has on the rear. So that's a nice upgrade in strenth on the front end

The rear diff posed some of it's own problems, such as a diesel fuel tank that is in the way under the Hardbody.

The rear diff off the Patrol was a big bonus. It is the H260 heavy duty with 10,5" crownwheel and 1,51" side shafts. Equivalent to the Dana60 and similar size diffs they use on the big Ford 350 dually trucks.

It also has a very nice, and working, LSD, that the guys in Australia say is very good off road.

As we planned how the project would go, the guy that picked up the Patrol made me an offer to keep all the body and other bits for a project of his own. As payment for this, he would transport the diffs, prop shafts and transfer case the 1500km to my house.

In an attempt to do things as cheap as possible, we approached our forum members to see what they had laying around that could possibly be used.

Now, as much as I would have liked a three or four link suspension setup, leaf srpings prove to be the fastest and easiest to do.

One of the forum members had a set of rear leaf springs from a Hardbody laying around. These springs are around 100mm longer than the front leaf springs of the Patrol, but I liked the idea of using the same springs as the rear for ease of replacement later. I also thought longer springs would give better articulation.

I believed that a spring designed for a one ton pickup would carry the weight of the Hardbody.

I spoke to many guys in the US to try and get information, but no one had done it my way, or with the spares I was going to use. So not much could really be planned ahead. We would just have to run into a problem and sort it out right there and then.

Right before Christmas, we pulled the Hardbody into a workshop a freind of mine had standing open. As this is my daily drive, the clock was ticking to get it back on the road as fast as possible.

I was working on two weeks... I was totally wrong

I thought it was difficult to take a hole saw to my car when I built the snorkel and had to make a hole in the fender, but I must have spent an hour or more looking at this and trying to get the courage to start up the grinder and cut suspension parts off the Hardbody.

To be continued.......

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The stripping process was slower than I thought. Un bolted evrything I could. Just that took more than a day.

The cutting went even slower between the grinder and the plasma cutter.

Nearly four days to just clean the chassis of the factory fitted brackets.

I also realised that a engine and body removal would have helped. There are many places I could not reach and clean as I would have liked.

The original plan was to have the spring mounts on the new built cross member on the front end.

But the angles turned out rubbish and I would have needed to extend the hangers down by 120mm. I was worried about the strength, and the lift was getting ridiculous. I was already at 150mm to just clear the sump.
This is also when I found my next problem, the leaf springs were too weak to carry the Hardbody. Even with the helper coil over spring and shock from the original Hardbody, it just crushed the coil.

Only option was to have an additional blade installed to the leaf pack. This is able to carry the Hardbody with the leaf pack standing dead straight and curve at all.

Built a high steer pitman arm on the Birfield to clear the leaf spring and custom adjustable steering link.

We did take it out onto the road with the first setup, but we had very bad bump steer and a death wobble that started at very low speed.

So it was back to the workshop and start over again.

We are now at nearly four weeks where we had worked out it would take two.

I turned the spring pack around and found that this moved the diff to the rear due to offset locating holes in the spring pack.
My fault for not measuring this all before welding everything back onto the chassis.

Took it all off again and decided to work things out a little better before welding stuff on again.

End result was that we made the wheel base 60mm longer to give us the clearances we needed and wanted for the bigger tires that would go on.

The springs ended up totally level.

Continued later....

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While working everything out, I posed the question a few times on how to work out or measure castor angle.

I looked at the owners manual for the Patrol and found castor to be 1,5deg and kingpin 7deg.

Setting the castor at 1,5 gave horrible handling. The car follows the road, and was prone to becoming unstable and "wobbly" if one of the front wheels went through a dip.

It was as if the car was not correcting itself to an upright position fast enough. While it is swaying from side to side, it is also causing steering feedback in the opposite direction. Feels like a slow death wobble.

Doing a lot of reading on the internet, I found that castor could be as high as 7 deg.

So we cut the spring perches off the diff and made new ones and set them up at 7deg to see what it would do.

Problem is that you can't just put these perches on temporary to test and move them later.

Then while we are discussing the result of this change, I find out that the kingpin angle is measured across the car, and has nothing to do with the castor angle. I had been using the kingpin angle measured from front to back as my measure of castor.

Seems my castor is now too much. This induces death wobble at any speed above 70km/h.

For now, a heavy steering damper has solved the problem, but it is not where I want to be with the setup.

While all this is happening, we are still not sure where we are going with shocks as we are not sure of articulation.

I did move the shocks wider on the chassis to try and get them to work harder to keep the car more upright.

I can't get the Hardbody high enough up the ramps without 4x4. But so far it seems tge shocks are too small. They bottom out under compression, and are not long enough to fully extend to full droop.

All the while the Hardbody is use on a daily basis. While we make adjustments to the front end, the rear end stays as is.

It does not help adding a mistake at the rear by accident, and the front end makes it worse, or impossible to find or fix.

I did have to raise the back end by 130mm to get the Hardbody to stand straight. We first addef lift blocks between the springs and diff, but this on it's own also causes big instability and axle wrap.

We then remove the lift blocks and extended the spring perches and schackle mounts.

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I forgot to mention that part of stabilising the front, I added the original sway bar.

This made a massive difference and has just about eliminated the body roll. It has sharpened up the steering and generally its more drivable around corners.

For road use, I will look at a swaybar for the rear as well. This will hamper articilation, but will improve handling on the road.

Swaybars need to have disconnects, and that is a another design I am working out to make things easy and fast. I don't want to be swinging wrenches for half an hour before I take to some rocks.

So now you basically know where we are, so let's see where we think we are going. And I say think, because I am still not sure how it all is going to work out, and if all my plans will come together.

Next is to test fit and set up the rear H260 diff

I have a pinion seal that needs to be replaced as the oil just runs out. The brakes look good amd should work without any work needing to be done. I have one wheel stud that needs to be replaced with its nut.

The LSD seems tight enough and looks to be in working order. O just need around six litres of LSX oil to fill it once the seal is sorted.

Brakes should hook up directly, but the Hardbody hand brake/ e-brake will need to be adapted to now work on the transfer case instead on the drums as they do now. This also looks to be fairly easy.

I want to set the new spring perches up and get everything ready. Both front and rear have been converted to a spring over axle (SOA) where it was SUA on the Patrol.

Once I know the diff is a "slide in on the weekend" exercise, the fuel tank must come out again.

The fuel tank can live inside the car for a while as we get evrything sorted with the drive train.

Next will be my biggest challange.....The tranfer case.

I have to replace the brake shoes for the hand brake, but I think that should be all that needs to be done.

But to make it fit under the Hardbody, we have to cut out and build the three crossmembers from the standard gearbox to the back.

Two of them need to become the carriers for the TC, and one will just be in the way for the forward propshaft to reach the diff.

The TC needs to be mounted so that we keep at least one of the propshafts standard with no length changes and costs involved.

I know I have to extend one of the propshafts due to the 60mm additional wheelbase I have given to clear the wheels in the front.

Then I need to get this made up to the correct length.

Here I have the short prop between the Patrol gearbox and TC. I have cut the pipe and fitted the UJ that will take the slip joint that goes into the Hardbody TC.

The Patrol and HB have not got the same UJs. So this will be the converter. It needs to work as an "H" joint and not a double cardon so that I can take up a slight drop in height between the two TCs. The Harbody floor was not designed to take that big hunk of Patrol TC.

All these propshaft measurements will only be available once everything is in place.

Continue later.

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To finish it all off, some small details need to be sorted out.

Axle wrap bars need to be constructed. You end up with a lot of leverage on the springs when you go this high.

The additional gearing will also double the torque to the diffs. We estimate around 16000Nm at 2000RPM on the side shafts at a speed of around 5km/h.

Crawl speed at idle should be 1,5km/h, or 26 meter per minute.

We also need to get an additional gear lever into the cab to control the second TC.

Re-location of the fuel tank. I don't know if I am even going to get the original 75l tank into a spot on the left side of Hardbody.

Before that can start to happen, the exhaust needs to move again. But this time it has to be routed to the right, or centre of the vehicle. I have three 3" mandrel bends left to do this with. Right now, I have no idea where I am going to bring it out under the body.

I used to have the problem that I constantly crushed the tail piece, but I am hoping that the additional lift will stop that problem.

The 33" spare wheel no longer fits under the chassis where the spare wheel would usually go. So rear bumper mounted spare wheel carriers will be constructed to carry two spares.

This does give me some space under the car for an additional fuel tank, or the ability to play around with two smaller tanks instead of the one big one. I would like a bit more range from the fuel supply, so if I could get 30-50 litre additional fuel supply under the car, it would be great.

My fuel consumption has got bad with the conversion due to the longer gearing I got with the bigger tires.

The Hardbody speedo reads 120 at a GPS speed of 129. It has robbed me of pulling away power. It drains power on hills and I find myself a gear lower than usual to try and keep speeds up.

I also notice boost is higher by about 0.3bar to maintain the same speeds as before.

I have an intercooler that needs to be installed when I get a chance. I hope this will improve power and maybe get it back to what it was.

And thats about it. I am hoping that the guys reading this has some questions and suggestions. You could possibly have a solution for a problem I have not even got to yet.

Its great to hear what the people have to say, so I hope to get some feedback from you all.
Let me leave you with some pictures....

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I've been driving Nissans since the late 80s with the exception of a Getz as a lighter vehicle to relieve the R31 Skyline fuel bill.

This 4x4 has changed my life. He is a member of the family. My wife hates the lift, but once we are on the road, she feels safe in him.

He has a name, we call him Hillbilly. He actually got that name when he was still IFS because of the way he would bounce up big rock inclines.

When we damaged him, I wss faced with the option of breaking him up and selling for spares, or just selling him.

My wife would not let me do either. We have been through some bad times financially, and Hillbilly has been there all the way.

When times were really tough, he lived on a diet of cooking oil and eluominating Parrafine. This worked out to a quarter the price of normal diesel.

So to say that we love our Nissan, is an under statement.

Things are just starting to turn for us and our business, and I have a long list of things for him.

The next is to get that second TC in and get him 4x4 again. Some time in the wild is long over due for all of us.

Thanks for the kind words, it's nice to see other lovers of the brand.

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Yes thanks.