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On the Fence – New Titan Swap Kits

You’ll likely be surprised. This is just a quick update as it’s late (as usual) and I want to keep everyone informed of whats going on behind the scenes… at least with Nissan related projects. I recently wrote about the old titan swap kit concept that we prototyped many years ago that maximizes the down travel of the Xterras and Frontiers. It was met with lots of speculation and questions regarding the extended length of the shock. As stated, I followed up with Radflo on those measurements. 19.1″ Extended on a 2.5″ IFP coilover. If you’re familiar with Titan swap shock lengths, you’re probably sctatching your head over this. If you’re not familiar with titan swap shock lengths, then your’re really probably scratching your head over this. Regardless, this more or less lines up with the additional travel we originally figured by this system many years ago. But how could this be? A few skeptics online met my posts with “CV bind is CV bind” implying that regarless of what is done with the shocks, or UCA’s.. you can’t get around the max angle of the CV’s. Which I agree with but …. actually… no. No, I don’t.

Let me fill you all in on a little known fact from nearly 20 years ago. Yes…. TWENTY. Which many people would still know about if we spent more time on the forums rather than Facebook and IG (Rant for another time). The cheap $75 CV replacements have less of a max operating angle that the OEM ones. so to that I say. Stop It! I personally refuse to run them on my Xterra and would much rather refresh a set of junkyard OEM CV’s than get knock off new ones because of a price tag knowing that they aren’t as good as the OEM ones, max angle aside. I’ve heard it over and over again. “I can break a whole lot of $75 for the cost of X”. But do you really want to? They have proven to be less reliable and have less operating angle… maybe thats one reason they are less reliable? I digress.

Use quality parts, have less problems, get more travel.
If you’re looking for used but good OEM CV’s and other Nissan parts, maybe Duncan the Nissan Parts Puller can help you out.
Since posting old info that seems to be new to many of you, my phone is ringing more regarding 2nd gen stuff, which is a good sign. If this continues, then the momentum on my end will continue too. Looking forward, I’m getting many smaller parts in order to add to the catalog. But the big question is, would the juice be worth the squeeze to fully revive this old design?

Reply below and let me know your thoughts.

Thanks for reading, Until next time,
-Steven

 

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The Godfather of Titan Swaps & Whats Next

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