Nissan Patrol 4x4 (Africa)

You wanna know how poo a day can get, well, I'm standing next to the road with a blowout on the caravan, and guess where the spare is? Not in the caravan where I was assured it was behind everything that I had packed in. So contents is all packed out, and no spare. Call the Sister in Law, to find it was stolen for use on the trailer a few weeks back, she had forgotten. Buddy now on his way from Parys with a spare. All the bad luck in one day, so the rest of the month can only be better.

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Geez man, Im sorry to hear about all the bad luck!
Sterkte!

This thread will die for a while now. My buddy happy to take a road trip. We getting a spare sorted out for the caravan today, 2 new tyres and check a few things. Sani parked in his garage and I'll tackle it in a month or two. I need to get to work and make some money. He will flatbed it down to Cape Town later, or I will come work on it, not sure yet. We leaving tonight, and he will tow the caravan down for me.

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Maybe for the best. You don't need Sani drama down there when you're on a new job. Ask Reenen if you can borrow something, it's not as if he has no extra 4x4s........

Sorry Dawid! Hope good luck returns.

Sadly you can't use David vd Merwe and good luck in the same sentence.

jakeslouw wrote:Maybe for the best. You don't need Sani drama down there when you're on a new job. Ask Reenen if you can borrow something, it's not as if he has no extra 4x4s........

The Sani will probably get used for nothing more than negotiating the 7000mx 6000m sand pit which is our building site. Only thing that has not got stuck there yet, is our 4x4, 4 wheel steer JCB. We have an old 200STI Auto Sentra to do duty to town if we have to.

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Last week I zipped up to Parys and did a few little things to the Sani. Amongst them, the Panhard chassis mount got a piece of shop counter angle iron welded in as a cross member. Added another coil bucket to coil bucket member for good measure.

Then took him in for wheel balance and alignment. In true style, Murphy made sure the worst two wheels were on the front. So the newly balanced rear wheels went on the front, and the first rotation in five years got done. Then off to the alignment machine, which I have been dreading, as it should tell a story of how I screwed up with the suspension build.

Big surprise and pat on the back. That suspension turned out perfectly straight. Wheels track exactly, wheel base is down to the millimeter. Aimed for 5deg castor and set a slight toe put with two pieces of angle iron clamped to two old rims.

This is what I got in my backyard mechanic method...


And this is what we got it set to on the machine.


So thanks to these two stars at Schwimms Tyres in Parys who allowed me to spend some time on their machine, and tune some custom settings into the Sani/Safari suspension.


Best base line we could find to load onto the machine, was a 80-83 MQ Patrol 160 3.3 Diesel heavy duty from Australia/New Zealand, which we believed would cover the H260 rear end.

So the result was great. Death Wobble was no more than a shimmy between 60 and 70, but once over that, smooth running to as fast as we could get it to go. So I loaded it up with some of my things, and hit the road to the West Coast next morning at 4am. Things felt slightly different as soon as I hit the road, compared to my tests of the previous day, and I can only presume my shortcut opting for radias arms instead of a 3 link+Pan, makes my Castor change if I load up, and can not keep the Sani perfectly level. My little angle finder seems to confirm this with a mere 2deg when I checked it in Britstown. Anyhow, I managed a good speed of around 100-110 clock speed, which translates to 110-120 GPS.

Sani is at home, and I could not resist taking him out on the farm. Tyres are rubbish in this sand, even at 1.5bar, and I dare not go lower, as I believe these 17 year old tyres will delaminate fairly fast at these pressures.




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davidvdm wrote: ↑18 Nov 2020 13:29 and I can only presume my shortcut opting for radias arms instead of a 3 link+Pan, makes my Castor change if I load up, and can not keep the Sani perfectly level.

This will be true for any suspension set-up. If the rear end droops but the front remains at the same height, there will be a change in caster equivalent to the change in angle between the chassis and the ground.

Well done on getting it that close.

Rise phoenix ....RISE !!!!

Well done old bean. Ol' Hillbilly is still a beast and now looks even better.