SinisterFrontier06's Build

Some shots of the swapped out Leather Interior:




If you haven't gotten the Weather Tech floor mats you need to! Highly recommend them! Well worth the money! Also in the shot is my Navara door sills:


Went on a road trip this weekend to meet up with a guy I found on ebay who was parting out a 2004 Titan 4x4 that was involved in a flood. His prices were stupid cheap so I cleaned him out of all the parts I could use!



I got everything you see here minus 1 of the VK56DEs for $650! I am missing the titan sway bar and drivers side lower control arm as the guy used it to fix his other Titan that was hit in the front, no worries!

I bought the flooded VK56DE for my brother for $70! I got mine for free as it was in my dads Titan that had a blown head gasket that we swapped out in favor of a lower mileage engine. He gave it to me for helping him swap in the new used motor.

Both engines we will rebuild as well as the transmission too. As you can see thats what we do around here in our shop:

Heated Steering and Auto Lights How To:

This will be completed in 3 parts, I will edit this post and add the 2 additional parts as I do them.


Things needed:
Masking Tape
Small Jewelers Flat Tip Screw Driver
Safety Pin
Electrical Tape

2009-2013 Pathfinder Heated Steering Wheel (I bought mine on ebay and as a bonus I found out mine was heated.)



If you purchased a new leather steering wheel from ebay and are unsure if yours is heated or not, look for this two wire white plug:



2009-2013 Pathfinder Combination Switch with Heated Steering:



This also has that 2 wire white plug that indicates its for heated steering.

2009-2013 Pathfinder or 2004-? Maxima Heated Steering Switch w/Clipped Pigtail Harness:



Before you go any further disconnect the battery!

Before you start remove the steering wheel and steering wheel cover. Check your wire colors against the repinned harness I have pictured below if it matches you can skip re-pinning the harness as yours is plug and play. I know 2009+ is plug and play where no repin is required. If your wire order does not match you have to repin the harness by following the steps below.


Part 1:
Repinning of the harness to accept the new Pathfinder combination switch.

Ok if you know how to read wiring diagrams you will notice that the wires and functions between the frontier combination switch and the pathfinder combination switch are the same but the pin outs are different so that means we have to de-pin the harness and re-pin it to match the pathfinder combination switch.

Here are the wire diagrams:

2006 Frontier:


2009 Pathfinder:


So here we have the harness in stock form:

Top:


Bottom:


Before we de-pin the harness you will notice there is 2 blue wires and 2 orange wires. On one blue and one orange you will notice they have 2 silver dots on them close together those wires are for the front washer motor. You need to take a piece of masking tape and label them as so. They are the 2 wires next to the wire that is white with a green stripe.

So now to de-pin the harness. With your jewelers screw driver pop these two white pieces off the combination switch harness:


Now if you look down into the front of the harness, its hard to see but you will see little white tabs that hold the pins in, with your safety pin push those tabs back and the pin will slide out. After you de-pin the harness it will look something like this, (I used a different picture from another project as I forgot to take a picture of the de-pinned harness):



Once you have all the wires de-pinned you will want to re-pin them like so:


Should look like this when complete:




Tape the harness back up and thats all for that harness:


Now we need to re-pin the air bag harness (Yellow Plug). To de-pin this harness you need to pop up the white tab and de-pin the harness as you did the combination switch harness:


De-Pinned:


Re-Pin Like So:


Now the last harness we need to re-pin is the gray connector next to the yellow air bag connector. The easiest way to do this without having to repin the steering wheel harness is to pin the harness to the way your steering wheel is currently setup. This is especially effective if you did the illuminated steering wheel control mod prior to this.

I originally only had cruise control so I only had 3 wires in this harness and they were sky blue, black and brown. I later added illuminated steering controls as well as radio controls so the additional wires I used to pin the harness for those added features dont match original colors, so in order to repin the harness I went by numbers and matched the wires according to the new number order. So using this chart and masking tape mark your wires according to the number the correspond to:


You de-pin the harness in the same matter as you de-pinned the yellow air bag harness. Mine looked like this when I started:


And ended like this:


If you get confused on what I just tried to explain, use the brown and black wires as reference to the chart and that should help.

Put everything back together and reconnect the battery everything should work as normal besides the new auto lights setting on the multi switch as that is obviously not hooked up yet.

Stay tuned for part 2.

Finally Titan swapped. And when I say Titan swapped I mean literally the entire suspension is from a Titan.

I wanted to do the typical Titan swap with the front suspension, but I wasn't keen on running spacers to get the rear to match the front and I had the C200 rear. So I ordered a Titan M226 rear axle. This not only allowed me to upgrade my rear axle and get the matching tire spacing but it also allowed me to convert to the bigger Titan brakes all the way around. This will be nice for preparation of the VK swap for more stopping power. Here is a pic of the rear axle installed:


I had to cut the old spring perches off and weld on new ones as well as some misc brackets transferred from the old axle assembly. Then I had to bend some new brake lines. I went ahead and put a 2" lift on the rear while I was at it along with Titan Bilstein 5100 shocks.

Up front I did a Rough Country 3" lift kit. Instead of flipping the bill for coilovers that I'll never use to full potential I decided to swap in Titan springs and Bistein 5100 struts. This was also decided for the extra weight the VK will put on the front end and this was cheaper than ordering Pathfinder V8 springs. Yes Titan struts don't bolt right in as the bolt pattern on the top hats are different. I made this work by ordering a Frontier front lift brackets along with the Rough Country front Titan lift kit.

I took both brackets (Frontier top, Titan bottom:


Cut a bracket off each side with a band saw:


Swapped brackets and welded them back together to make new conversion spacers:


Bolted them to the Titan Spring/Bilstein 5100 combo:


Bolted them in place, perfect fit!:


Sitting on the ground under its own weight, full titan suspension, lifted 3" in the front, 2" in the rear on Bilstein 5100s and Titan 18" rims.

Got her out for a test drive finally, drove it around, rides like a new truck minus my alignment being all jacked up lol



I noticed my brakes being spongy, like wouldn't get brakes till the pedal was about halfway down. I figured I still had air in the lines. Right as I took this picture I could smell my brakes as if I had been riding them. So I took it back to the shop to investigate. Well what I found was pretty amazing lol. The used front calipers I had (which I didn't bother to try and reset the pistons on because I figured they were fine and went right on, well I figured wrong) locked up. They were seized. I had to pry them off. When I pried them off this what I found:



I have never seen caliper pistons crumble like this! Both sides were like this only the driver side was leaking. So I ordered new (reman) calipers and installed them the next day. Pedal is still not there till about midway down and then the truck stops on a dime. I'm thinking I have air stuck in the abs unit as I am not sure I bled the master cylinder correctly when I installed it as the crappy bleeder kit that came with it didn't seem to work right. When I initially bled the brakes everything bled as it should, but when I started the truck up the pedal went straight to the floor. After I pumped it a few times I eventually got half pedal and its stayed like that ever since thus the reason I think I have a air pocket. My buddy said he will hook it up to their vacume bleeder when I take it to him to get aligned. Hopefully that takes care of it.