Shop Overland Frontier build

[P&P Engineering]

We’re a shop in northern Indiana producing off road armor for Toyotas and Nissans.

We had been using our 2018 Tacoma for our work/shop truck, but after picking up our Frontier we decided it was much better at doing truck stuff than the Tacoma.

So here we are ... building a truck that we can not only camp and offroad out of, but also use to transport our products back and forth to our powder coating shop and picking up project vehicles.

We started off with doing a Titan swap kit from Nisstec out of Colorado. We’re also using extended Radflos. Makes for a nice flexy suspension.



We put some stock Titan wheels on it with some 33” Cooper ATs. Only took it out once with this setup before we continued the mods.

Like I said... truck stuff ?. My K5 blew a hydraulic steering line on its shakedown run, so we had to use the Frontier for recovery and pulling it back to camp



More to come ...

 

[llamalander]

Looks good! Turns out it's really hard to find sliders for Crew-cab long beds, might be worth making some if you got time...

 

[P&P Engineering]

Looks good! Turns out it's really hard to find sliders for Crew-cab long beds, might be worth making some if you got time...

Funny enough, every Frontier we’ve had in the shop (5 at this point) have all been crew cab short beds). We’d love to offer a set, would just need a customer to bring that truck to us so we can measure and test fit.

 

[P&P Engineering]

Bumper build...

We actually started this before the Titan swap was done, but didn't get it completely finished. We decided we wanted a modular setup for the our Frontier line. This gives up a center section/winch base and allows us to change up the our wings easier for production. This gives us the opportunity to easily make a full steel bumper as we have for this truck as well as a hybrid "tube" bumper.



Pretty satisfied with how it tuned out. We opted to go without the hoop on final build, but it is an option.




We've test fit the Warn Zeon series and the Smittybuilt X20 series. We figured it was time to test fit another rather large winch... We purchased the Badlands APEX 12k winch to toss in there. Tight fit, but it all fit. Sometimes it difficult to make a bumper to hold large winches and still have easy winch access without going for that fat bottom lip look. I think it turned out good.

We've been making rock sliders and skid plates for these Frontiers for awhile now, so nothing new there. They did the trick and we gave them a full workout during our Colorado shakedown run.

 

[rruff]

We had been using our 2018 Tacoma for our work/shop truck, but after picking up our Frontier we decided it was much better at doing truck stuff than the Tacoma.

Why is that?

 

[P&P Engineering]

Much

Why is that?

Better power curve and handles our car hauler a lot better than our Tacoma. Even on 35s it pulls the trailer easier than the Tacoma on 32s.

 

[rruff]

Ya, I keep hearing the Tacoma needs a regear even with stock tires.

 

[CrowderSoup]

This is looking awesome! I can't wait until I can buy myself a frontier and follow in your footsteps.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

 

[goFWD]

I like how your front bumpers are more compact and don't make the Frontier have the Bubba Blue lip like a lot of others. "...lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp..."

Any story on the roof rack seen in your gas station pic? Does it have the same double slotted crossbars as the XTerra overland rack you sell? If so, I could see that being a popular item given the aftermarket support for slotted crossbars, they're very configurable, and I'm not aware of any similar rack option for the Frontier -- most aftermarket racks are the usual Thule/Yakima style round crossbars or drop-in baskets like the DepHep for the stock roof rack.

 

[paulforeman]

Cool to see your build on here! Looking forward to seeing more!

 

[Furaites]

Well I had over 9000$ worth of parts ordered for my Fronty....all sorts of issues and it never ended up shipping. Then when I was tracking down a new supplier, well I hit a moose. Myself and my son walked away fine....Insurance sunk 33,000$ into fixxing it, and it ain't been the same since. WISH, WISH I could do that, but this Fronty ain't running right at all

 

[justbecause]

Well I had over 9000$ worth of parts ordered for my Fronty....all sorts of issues and it never ended up shipping. Then when I was tracking down a new supplier, well I hit a moose. Myself and my son walked away fine....Insurance sunk 33,000$ into fixxing it, and it ain't been the same since. WISH, WISH I could do that, but this Fronty ain't running right at all

How do you spend 33k to fix a frontier? just buy a new one....

 

[Furaites]

I didn’t...insurance company did. New it was 43k after taxes....hit a moose...collision shop picked it up, and 2 separate quotes came back at just under 16k. So insurance fixed it, and the collision shop said there was damage that only came apparent after the repairs...another 12k. The insurance then tallied the cost of the first repairs with the price of it new to get a value of 69k(16k they “invested”). So 69k vehicle, with now a total of 28k in repairs...in their eyes it was still a viable repair. The additional 5k is the back and forth over a 6 month period for them to fix their shoddy work(ie not tightening any bolts/nuts holding my front driver side quarter panel on, and it falling off on the highway)

 

[justbecause]

I didn’t...insurance company did. New it was 43k after taxes....hit a moose...collision shop picked it up, and 2 separate quotes came back at just under 16k. So insurance fixed it, and the collision shop said there was damage that only came apparent after the repairs...another 12k. The insurance then tallied the cost of the first repairs with the price of it new to get a value of 69k(16k they “invested”). So 69k vehicle, with now a total of 28k in repairs...in their eyes it was still a viable repair. The additional 5k is the back and forth over a 6 month period for them to fix their shoddy work(ie not tightening any bolts/nuts holding my front driver side quarter panel on, and it falling off on the highway)

Thats wild. I feel like I regularly see people talking about buying brand new pro4x frontiers for about 30k. Previously it made me feel like I overpaid for mine, but 5 years and almost 100k miles later it doesn't bother me as much. It has been the best thing I've ever owned, I just wish the GVWR was higher. MPG being higher wouldnt hurt my feelings either....

 

[rruff]

I didn’t...insurance company did.

Don't if this was an option, but taking the cash and the damaged truck, then selling the truck, would be a better way to go...