JDO's long-term outback tourer build

neilh · Sep 20, 2016

cssuk said:
LRAs tank is 135l fits in the normal location

JDO said:
There is a lot of space forward of the existing tank, not sure why you'd have to go backward into the spare wheel space unless mounting is difficult.

Gotcha - my mistake! You said replacement tank and I read additional tank

I have seen some larger capacity replacement tanks as well - what I didn't like with those was they then stuck out lower than the chassis rails. I'm not sure whether the ones you're looking at do as well or whether you can get a bash plate that would protect it...

JDO · Sep 20, 2016

neilh said:
Gotcha - my mistake! You said replacement tank and I read additional tank

I have seen some larger capacity replacement tanks as well - what I didn't like with those was they then stuck out lower than the chassis rails. I'm not sure whether the ones you're looking at do as well or whether you can get a bash plate that would protect it...

I haven't seen any additional tanks - do you have a link? My Patrol had an auxiliary tank and it gave me some confidence when filling up with dodgy fuel, I could always keep a supply of good quality city fuel in the aux.

Rich. · Sep 21, 2016

JDO said:
I haven't seen any additional tanks - do you have a link? My Patrol had an auxiliary tank and it gave me some confidence when filling up with dodgy fuel, I could always keep a supply of good quality city fuel in the aux.

The other problem here is that Neil will be talking D40 not NP300. Im pretty sure long ranger make an additional and a larger tank for the D40, i wouldn't have a clue about the NP300 though.

neilh · Sep 21, 2016

Rich. said:
The other problem here is that Neil will be talking D40 not NP300. Im pretty sure long ranger make an additional and a larger tank for the D40, i wouldn't have a clue about the NP300 though.

Hehe - yeah, fair point well made

neilh · Sep 21, 2016

This was the aux tank I'd seen for the D40:
https://www.frontrunneroutfitters.com/en/be/front-runner-65l-additional-fuel-tank-nissan-navara.html

JDO · Oct 23, 2016

Ok, it's been a while. Work has kept me busy but it's time to start work on my auxiliary battery setup.

In the mean time, here's a pic from work yesterday with three generations of Nav living in harmony. (Interestingly, the D40 is the oldest of these by a good few years.)

Co1 · Oct 23, 2016

neilh said:
This was the aux tank I'd seen for the D40:
https://www.frontrunneroutfitters.com/en/be/front-runner-65l-additional-fuel-tank-nissan-navara.html

That price appears ludacris! I'm pretty sure you could get one custom fabbed for a good deal less.

JDO · Jan 11, 2017

Just checking in to say I'm not dead and I haven't abandoned my Navara, but the temperatures here lately have meant the idea of lying on my concrete driveway in the sun doesn't fill me with joy...

Once the heat breaks, I'll resume my battery project.

In the mean time I have bought a new, heavier trailer (about 1,200kg laden) which has electric brakes. Navara is off to have the brake controller fitted. The Nissan genuine tow bar harness is meant to be "pre-wired" for this, but it seems considerably cheaper to send it to an auto electrician who will run their own wires because Nissan can't/won't provide a wiring diagram to let us use theirs.

lookskyward1 · Jan 11, 2017

41.5 C. :faint

It's a pity we couldn't do an average with our temperatures to keep us all happy.:sunny:

JDO · Jan 11, 2017

lookskyward1 said:
41.5 C. :faint

It's a pity we couldn't do an average with our temperatures to keep us all happy.:sunny:

It gets better over the next few days, but not much. Nobbys Head is a lighthouse sticking out into the sea; inland from it, where I live, it's usually 5 degrees hotter (or colder):

My next big adventure is locked in for March. A sneak preview (not my picture):

JDO · Mar 19, 2017

Ok so again, apologies for the long time between drinks. Between the weather, a family that demands I spend at least some of our money on things other than my Navara, and my wife's pretty advanced stage of pregnancy, things have taken a back seat. But I do have some new stuff to show off!

First up, after my last complaint about the heat, it got hotter:

The biggest news is that the camper you may have seen behind me in some of my posts last year was always a rental. We tried a few different types and now we have bought our own. I don't have any pics because it's at the back of my garage behind lots of ****, but we're about to head off on a two week trip so you'll see pics there.

To look after my trailer, which has a little 85Ah battery in it, I wired up a 50A Anderson plug below the trailer plug. This is permanently live and is hooked up with 6 gauge wire so voltage drop should be minimal. I've got a 30A fuse on it but I might change this to a resettable breaker I just found in the garage. I might regret this mounting location if it gets covered in mud... we will see:

I already regret my decision, deliberate at the time, to make this permanently live. I might swap it over to come on with the ignition. I can draw a wiring diagram of how this is done hypothetically, but the actual execution under the bonnet might be beyond me. A small investment in an auto electrician I think...

The trailer has a gross mass of 1200kg (but should weigh less than 1000kg in service), which means in NSW that it requires brakes, but not a breakaway unit. I opted for 10" electric drum brakes on the trailer, which need a brake controller fitted to my car. The Redarc unit I chose is an accelerometer type, applying the trailer brakes proportionally with the vehicle's rate of deceleration. You can manually set the maximum braking force using the rotary dial (to stop brake lockup), or it has an auto mode, which uses some kind of white magic to detect trailer shunt and adjust the brakes automatically. It seems pretty effective so far but I've not really demanded much of it.

So, now to test this stuff out. My last post said I was going to northern NSW and Outback Queensland. Unfortunately the weather has gone from hot to bloody horrible and a lot of the black soil roads I planned to use will be an impassable quagmire:

(if that image doesn't work for you, it's a series of current flood warnings for every major river system in northern NSW.)

Instead we will head south into the Australian Alps and base ourselves at a base camp and go out for day trips without the trailer. The high country is full of some great off-road driving, a lot of which is beyond the capacity of a relatively stock Navara, but hopefully I will find enough tracks I can do to make the trip worthwhile. I'll put some pics up here or the My Navara in Scenic Places thread depending how good my photography is.

When we get back from this trip, next on the list is a water tank with an electric pump for the tub, and a fuel tank upgrade. Stay tuned!

JDO · Mar 22, 2017

So here is the Navara and the trailer at the family farm. I've covered in another thread the abnormally high ball weight (which you can see stems from the long drawbar design), but the effect is exaggerated in this picture because the car is on a tiny up slope and the trailer is on a slight down slope.

I did have a question about our setup, so:

On the roof we have a spare wheel (additional to the one under the tub), four traction mats, a shovel and an axe, plus the shade awning strapped to the side.

The trailer carries the tent (well, it is the tent), our bedding (for three of us, soon to be four), 85L of water, an 85Ah battery with a 240V charger (but no 12V yet, stay tuned), all our kitchen stuff (stove, pots, pans etc), two 4.5kg LPG bottles, a 50L fridge, its own spare wheel, and our folding chairs and other miscellaneous camping stuff such as torches, lights, buckets, matches and so on.

The ute tub carries 40L of additional fuel, a 40L fridge connected to a 130Ah battery, all our dry foods, 30L of water (for an emergency in case we have to abandon the trailer, which is good because I filled it from the garden hose and it tastes awful), our clothes, a folding table (because it doesn't fit in the trailer), and the bulk of the rest is taken up by recovery equipment.

The recovery equipment includes those four mats and the tools on the roof, plus an exhaust jack, a hand winch and its associated straps, wire rope and shackles, a tool kit, and a bucket full of fuses of every conceivable type and capacity. Plus duct tape and rescue tape and a couple of ratchet straps. The most useful item, however, is a 12V air compressor.

Also part of my kit but not with me on this trip is a 160W solar panel array, a 1kVA petrol generator, and a small Weber BBQ. The latter is for the sort of holiday where we stay put for a week or two; the generator almost never gets used and is currently sitting in our bushfire pack at home, and the solar panels would normally go with the trailer but are not necessary on this trip as I expect 240V power to be available most nights.

JDO · Mar 23, 2017

Our first camp on the way to the mountains. Have not set up the annexe to the trailer. Takes about 10 minutes to set it up like this from pulling up.

The view from the tent:

JDO · Mar 24, 2017

Some observations on this setup so far.

Last night was a free camp with the trailer and it went pretty well. I need to stick a little spirit level on the draw bar because we ended up a bit head-down in bed... I didn't mind but the wife wouldn't shut up about it!

The 85Ah battery is, predictably, too small. By this morning it was down to 12.8V. I hooked it up to the car all day (noting that this just connects it in parallel to the start battery at the moment, which itself is not always being charged) and continued to run the fridge all day while driving. Down to 12.6V pulling into camp tonight. And that's just running a little 50L fridge in pretty mild ambient temps - it wouldn't have got hotter than 21 or 22 today. When I get my 110L behemoth, well...

Speaking of the battery, I need to add an Anderson plug converter to my air compressor, which currently has direct-to-battery alligator clips. This is fine for the four car wheels, but I aired the car and trailer down to 26PSI for off-road driving today and when I came to put them back up, the compressor hose can't reach the trailer wheels while connected under the bonnet.

This in turn reminds me of pressures - some nut job had the trailer tyres at 55PSI! I let them down to a slightly less ridiculous 40 and found my "smart learning" brake controller was now locking the trailer wheels all the time. I had to manually back it off a bit. Goes to show the difference in traction correct tyre pressures make.

In terms of driving the setup went better than expected. I thought that very long draw bar would be a critical rampover limitation for me, but in fact while I touched the safety chains down many times (they make a distinct jingle audible in the cabin), I never grounded the draw bar. In fact I even ran out of departure angle and slammed the tow bar itself into the dirt coming out of one drainage swale, and the trailer didn't touch at all. Top marks for that.

After my lunch stop at Ravine, I spent 2 hours climbing on a 12km track. With such low average speeds and a 1000kg weight to drag along the gearbox (in 4H) was never out of 1st and 2nd so I swapped to 4L. The car coped much better like this, although there is a pretty loud whine from the transfer case running in 4L, and 4L is very temperamental about actually engaging. You have to roll is back and forward a bit and slot in and out of gear to make it stick. The descent into Ravine I used 4H and manually flicked between 1st-3rd for engine braking and this worked fine.

The car and trailer also did their first serious water crossing together across the Yarongobilly River and acquitted themselves well. Not a drop in the trailer, even though the body was partly submerged, and the car was flawless except my slightly too gung-ho entrance speed kicked up a bow wave that bent my front number plate.

The only other lessons today were that my toilet bucket (for the comfort of my dear, 32w pregnant wife) does not fit out of the side window of the canopy, necessitating a complete unpack to get it out (note to self: put this at the back of the tub, not the front); and that if you don't take care when sliding the trailer fridge closed, you can make it run over its own power cable and blow a fuse.

Camp at sunrise:

This is pretty typical of the sort of driving I was doing today: not technically challenging but a bit demanding of traction and rampover angles on slopes and erosion mounds:

This is why I carry an axe (carrying a chainsaw is illegal in national parks and state forests). Clearly I'm the first car through here in some days:

Some pretty scenery (see more on these in the "My Navara in Scenic Places" sticky):

Lunch stop at the Ravine ruins, my boy on the lookout for snakes (so he told me):

Yarrongobilly River crossing, pretty easy but has large, smooth rocks as a base. I'm glad I was running lower tyre pressures. My wife, very unfairly, refused to wade across and photograph me crossing. I refused to let her photograph from this side and then reverse a trailer back through the river to pick her up. So settle for this photo and some in cabin video, if I can ever be bothered uploading that:

lookskyward1 · Mar 24, 2017

JDO, your stories and pictures are fantastic. It really is good to hear the history behind some of the places you're visiting, it would be so easy just to breeze through without appreciating what has affected the area in the past.

Keep up the good work. :awesomework

JDO · Mar 24, 2017

Had a go at uploading some video. This is just hand held from an iPhone and is therefore completely unedited, but you get the idea. Usual disclaimer that the video seems to flatten out the steepness.

landmannnn · Mar 24, 2017

JDO said:
Ok so again, apologies for the long time between drinks. Between the weather, a family that demands I spend at least some of our money on things other than my Navara, and my wife's pretty advanced stage of pregnancy, things have taken a back seat. But I do have some new stuff to show off!

First up, after my last complaint about the heat, it got hotter:

Now that is warm!

JDO · Mar 31, 2017

Alright, back from our 9-day trip and a few lessons to take on board. Photo highlights are up on the "My Navara in Scenic Places" thread. Still working on some GoPro too.

First up, I'm going to begin incorporating modifications to my trailer in this thread, as the car and trailer are a remote-area touring package that are equally useless without each other. I can't carry food, water and fuel for four for two weeks in just the car (well, not to a level of comfort that the other three would find acceptable, especially as No 4 will be only six weeks old when our next trip starts). Likewise the trailer can't tow itself.

Lessons from the trip:

1) The Navara's departure angle with the tow bar fitted is its critical angle off road. Unfortunately the Nissan genuine tow bar includes two reinforcing flanges welded vertically either side of the 50mm receiver, shaped like a V. These serve to force mud and little rocks to pack into the hollow 50mm receiver tube (trailer not fitted) or the hollow stem of the hitch tongue (trailer fitted). These are a devil to get out without the aid of high pressure water.

Some kind of blanking plate on the back (leading end) of the receiver tube to seal it off is required.

As I have, um, exceeded the design specifications of the jockey wheel mount on the trailer and need a new one welded on, I might get a fabricator to do these two jobs at once.

2) The seemingly flimsy Nissan bash plate under the engine bay is actually pretty capable. It took three big blows, supporting the weight of the car on two of them and into a rock hard enough to immediately halt the car on the third.

It's got a few dents in it and will need re-painting one day but otherwise did what it was engineered to do. Expensive aftermarket replacements are unnecessary.

3) Low range is a spectacular pain in the **** to engage. It tells you not to move the shifter while waiting but I often had to shuffle between gear, neutral and reverse to make it bang into low. Once you're in, trying to manually select 1st for a walking pace hill descent requires you to come to a complete standstill which is not always possible.

Even worse on one steep slope with the car gently sliding backwards with all four wheels locked, moving from 4H to 4L prompted the transfer case to pop itself into neutral and hoot at me alarmingly while I offered profanity and prayer in equal measure.

4L definitely needs to be selected judiciously in advance of the point at which it is required. Prolonged running in 4L, even at a max speed of 40km/h, prompts whine from the transfer case. Not too loud but not something I've heard before.

4) The trailer is fitted with a Trigg type hitch. This consists of a coupling bolted to the trailer which has a greased shaft allowing 360o of roll, and a captured polyurethane bushing. A pair of horizontal prongs attach to the car's hitch receiver and a vertical pin passes through the bushing. Pic below (not my pic).

This allows unlimited yaw (well, more yaw than is possible before jack knifing the trailer) and 70 degrees of pitch.

Problems: reversing up to hitch the trailer requires me to have my wife outside adjusting the jockey wheel to get the poly block aligned vertically between the two prongs on the car, while also maintaining perfect fore/aft and left/right precision to allow me to drop the vertical pin through. This is not a process that prolongs marriage, especially on uneven ground.

The hitch also effectively lengthens the draw bar/tow bar combination by six inches as the vertical pin is displaced rearward from where a 50mm tow ball would be.

I never ran out of articulation with this arrangement, but it's possible in the future I could, especially pitch. I am considering a McHitch auto-coupler (www.mchitch.com.au, $395) which solves the hitching difficulty and articulation limits, but still lengths the tow bar, or a Hitch Ezy drop-on coupling (www.hitch-ezy.com.au, $795) which solves all my troubles but costs lots.

5) Standard fuel range is inadequate. Towing over rough ground pushes fuel consumption up to 17.5L/100km, which drops my safe range to 400km. On my next trip I will need 650km between drinks. So it's either 50L of jerry cans or one of the three available main tank replacements (ranging from 135L to 150L).

This will be the next thing I buy.

That and a bigger fridge.

JDO · May 25, 2017

My next trip is locked in: 15 July we will be heading off here:

I did have plans for this to be a grand off-road trip along outback tracks through western Queensland, using the exposure to remote area travel, corrugations and bull dust to test my suspension, dust proofing and cargo capacity for fuel and water. This would have been Shakedown Trip 2 for my grand desert adventure in 2019.

As it happens, we would have been completing this trip with a 10 week old baby and my 2yo son, and sensibility has kicked in (with help from my wife) - still going to Ayers Rock, but via the more sensible highway route. I don't want such a young baby to be two days away from the nearest ER. But that's still a return trip of 5,600km, the same as London to Istanbul and back. We will use the lack of technical challenge to focus on getting our towing, camp setup and packing system really dialled in and experiment with fuel and water carriage in an environment where they are not critical.

To that end, following a few discussions in different threads on this forum in which I have done a 180 in thinking, I have decided to install airbag spring helpers to the rear of the Nav.

Why? Well, here's why. We all know utes that tow big loads are prone to bending or cracking the chassis. The best way to fix that is obviously to avoid overloading it, and then to make sure the suspension is properly calibrated so you're not forever smashing the chassis into the bump stops. The biggest, hairiest Old Man Emu kit for my NP300 caters for a constant 600kg load. There are other options between there and the 300kg setup I have installed. Only difference between these kits? Rear spring stiffness. Nothing else. Even the shock is the same.

So my thought is that if I get a 600kg rear spring, 90% of the time I'll hate the ride. All the airbags do, when used properly and conservatively, is simulate a stiffer rear spring. Sold. I'm booking the car in tomorrow.

Still looking at neater options for water and fuel.

JDO · Jun 20, 2017

Airbags are in. They are Polyair brand and fit inside the coils. The valves to inflate/deflate are mounted in the bumper either side of the number plate.

This pic is of them with 10PSI in. The permissible range is 3PSI (no load effect, just preserves the shape and stops the bag being pinched in the coils), up to 30PSI (max load).

According to the materials provided with the airbags, they actually work by sticking out between the spring coils like a fat kid puffing his cheeks (not by resisting vertical load). At 30PSI they basically add 450kg capacity to the springs.

I've only driven them to/from work and can tell you at 10PSI they add a little bit of stiffness, most noticeably for low speed, high articulation scenarios like speed bumps and crossing kerbs.

JDO's long-term outback tourer build

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