Leaderboard

Ah yes, let me expand on that. This part of the project is one of the main reasons I became more willing to move forward on it. In short, I'll be using the R50 tone ring. I had a junk R50 spindle and hub laying around. Ring pops off with a little effort, and the ID is just barely large enough. The backside of the D44 hub will get machined down to about 1/8" thickness (about the thickness of the flat lip at the top). Since the H3 approach was already laid out at the time, I did look into using the GM ring initially. But it's 55-tooth vs. the R50's 48-tooth. Any mismatch would/should screw with the ABS and ECU. Tried to find suitable matching rings that could maybe be machined down to fit the rear axle shafts, but that sort of search proved difficult. One more notable about the brakes: whenever I've read about Nissan guys using the D44 brakes, they always need to jump to a larger brake booster and/or master cylinder. The D44 calipers are monster one-pots. I was stoked to see that the H3 rotors were the exact same thickness as the R50 rotors, and very similar diameters. Using the R50 calipers means not having to change anything about the system, which is huge. The next hope is that both the ABS and brake hose are long enough to support axle droop with my setup. It looks very promising considering that the lines snake around the strut and have a lot of slack. Thanks for the offer about the WD21 shaft dimensions. The FSMs have so far provided the base dimensions, except the slip distance. I was also really surprised to see in the FSM (and echoed by Nissan Nut) that the WD21 driveshaft also uses the oddball u-joints the R50 does. All the other trucks had the 1310 joints (same true for the rear shafts). What gives, Nissan?