Who is it? Well, the Titan swap saga started nearly 2 decades ago. The majority of the well known companies in the Nissan off road space simply didn’t exist, and the 2nd Generation Xterras and Frontiers were only a couple years old. As I had mentioned in a previous e-mail/post/blog a few weeks ago, I largely stayed in my lane staying away from doing titan swap kits for a few reasons. However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t know about them.. I definitely did. I was just focused on other products in the Nissan space. Through this time, there was one guy that knew every titan swap parts combo with massive amounts of detail, and to this day I believe that he knows more about every combination of titan swap parts than anyone else I could possibly think of. We chat once in a while, and just recently we had discussed my extended travel / wide mount titan swap upper control arm prototype from years ago. (For more details, look back at my post from April 3rd.) Like most people responding on social media, there were a lot of questions. As it turns out, the Heim / uniball upper control arm that I had referenced there, was an old design that was retired and redesigned with a new uniball angle therefore solving the same issue that our wide mount arms addressed. This is where the perspective of additional droop came from. I’m not sure when that revision happened but it seems that we were either ahead of the times but never released the solution or there were a few minds at work trying to maximize the performance of the titan swap… at the same time.
At this point, it seems that we have multiple solutions to the same problem, but with different parts and various pros and cons. Thats where my chat with the Godfather of Titan Swaps ended.
I haven’t verified max droop and overall travel differences yet, but I’ll be digging into the numbers soon just to make sure that we’re all on the same page with quantified facts. As this subject resides in a prominent place in my brain, the more it seems that i’m inching towards putting a complete titan swap kit together. One of the driving factors is that my own Xterra needs a lot of way overdue TLC, and I’m debating if i’m simply going to fix and refresh various things or if it’s going to get some sort of overhaul. I really don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but would rather focus on areas of untapped potential for specific use cases, or atleast an easily accessible performance kit that isn’t currently offered.
If you’re wondering who the Godfather of Titan Swaps is, you’ll have to wait like many of us did episode-after-episode of ‘How I met your Mother’. The exception here is that I won’t string you along for 208 episodes. But lets be honest, many of you already know who he is, the the guy is a Nissan suspension legend.
Stay Tuned.
-Steven
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