The Nissan Pathmaker OneTon SAS Build – Part 2 – De-Bracketry

After finally buying a house in the red-hot housing market of 2008 as a 24 year old the finances were tight as you can imagine. The house came with a carport and I had the carpentry skills to build a small but serviceable shop that would let me finally start my SAS after the years of working in other peoples driveways or in the gravel! It was going to be tight and there would be compromises but I was out of the rain and able to start a what turned out to be years long project (is a wheeler ever really done?!)

Digging back thru my local offroad forum I found the original build thread, of which I’ll be referencing as we go here because it’ll be interesting to see how the plans change or stay the same. The very rough build list was as follows:

Parts List:

“Leaf-sprung all the way around (im poor, links are too spendy)

14b rear

D60 front

NWF black box so i can run my tx10-doubled to a D300

Full hydro

Full exo

39’s (maaaybe 42’s because those ones of myles are schminty)

Annnnnd im sure theres lots of other shit that’ll get added to list as I go”

As you can see the plan was well thought out and very detailed! But hey just figure it out as ya go! Step one was to cut all the old IFS stuff off, really quickly the point of “no going back” passes and you’re in it for the duration. Here’s a great quote from my original thread ” So at about 10pm last night we decided to start cutting the brackets off the frame……..and the neighbours didnt even complain…this is good.” They were to put up with many late nights.

Time to pull it into the shop, take the rollers off and the front bumper off and start unbolting pretty much everything below the frame rails.

You can see the Automotive Customizers Upper A-Arms that correct the balljoint angles when doing a torsion bar lift, as well as you can see the Calmini Steering. It was a fantastic upgrade and I also was one of the lucky ones that bought them right when they came out for only around $275US, by the time I took it off and sold it the retail price on the set up was something like $575US so I sold it for $400 and profited off it!

Everything unbolted and ready to start cutting and grinding. No end of black snot and I shake my (significantly deafer) head now at how little safety equipment I used to wear, not sure what I was thinking but I sure wish I had spent more time wearing the muffs as I went!

Starting to look a little better already but man is there sure a lot of bracket left on the frame!

Parts pile ready to go, time to fire up the angle grinder and make some noise! I’ll save you the literally 10’s of hours of cutting and grinding that I can sum up with one nice photo of sparks now.

Time to head to the rear and get that old H233b axle out of there, you’ve done well old girl. I apologize for all the neutral drops, I was just a punk kid!

Now thats a serious pile of scrap metal! Thanks to the loaner plasma cutter it could have been a lot more work but there is grinding for days upcoming, gotta get that frame clean. Also ended up with a decent stock of parts. About the only weight loss the Pathmaker will do on its whole journey!

With many more hours of grinding ahead we can move on to the next post. I start to deal with some ever present Nissan Pathfinder rust……..not under the back seats, thats unheard of!

Check out Part 3 in the next blog post here: The Nissan Pathmaker OneTon SAS Build Blog – Part 3 – Rust Bucket

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