2004 Nissan Titan Rear Steering Kit - Project Mega Titan

Once Lavender's concept was finalized in Solidworks, he printed a life-size template on paper. The idea here was to test-fit the design on the block using paper, rather than wasting time and material trying to get it right with metal. Here, Lavender cuts out the line drawing template with a razor blade. Once cut, Lavender held the paper up to the block to ensure a proper fit. The design worked perfectly.

Using spray-on adhesive, Lavender attached his paper templates to a piece of 3/8-inch-thick sheetmetal. Next, an optical center punch was used to make indents where each of the mounting holes needed to be drilled. This simple tool allows a fabricator to achieve a higher level of precision when it comes to drilling holes.

With the template glued to the metal as a pattern, Lavender began cutting the part on his vertical bandsaw. The process seemed almost too easy as the first part of the bracket took shape. Lavender tells us that he tries to build all one-off brackets in this manner because it allows him to duplicate anything he's built by simply printing out a file from his computer, as shown above.

Once each individual part of the bracket was cut and drilled, Lavender welded them together. Next, the bracket was bead-blasted and coated with a generous layer of high-temp spray paint. Here you can see how the bracket allowed fitment of the new TC pump in place of the A/C compressor. We sourced a new TC pump from West Texas Off-Road. The pump was equipped with a -8 JIC fitting at the inlet and a -6 JIC fitting at the outlet. These fittings would allow Lavender to easily plumb the pump to the rest of the system.

With the new TC pump mounted in place, Lavender turned his attention to fortifying the high-steer arms that came with the Dynatrac Pro-80 rear axle. As you can see from this photo, it didn't take much to make the arms suitable for our needs. Basically, he made these arms to be double-shear instead of single-shear in design. Double-shear-arrangements such as this are advantageous because they distribute the stress between two points rather than one. This mounting method is common in the competitive rock-racing arena. The additional strength afforded by the upper brace ensures that both the mounting bolt and arm survive against the leverage of 54-inch tires.

Here is a closer look at the double-shear mounting method described above. (Note that both the ram and the tie rod have metal mounts on each side of each Heim joint.) Much strength can be found by using the double-shear method. As you can see, Lavender took advantage of the cast low steer arms incorporated right into Dynatrac's knuckle.