Armor
January 2006
Nissan's
Marketing department would be shocked, *SHOCKED* I say, that some fool
would take their urban assault vehicle off-road. The list of soft
chewy morsels on the underbelly of the Mo for wild hungry rocks and
fallen tree branches to devour are almost too many to count....
...but I will anyway:
The radiator is plastic, and the bottom of it is just behind that silver plastic on the lower portion of the front bumper, not protected at all by the front sub-frame.
The engine and tranny oil pans are actually reasonably tucked in behind the front subframe, but none the less more protection for these critical areas is always good.
The gas tank is plastic, and considering the recall to add metal guards to all 2003-06 Murano's fuel tanks was just announced I see I'm not the only one freaked out by that.
The rear diff is very exposed, with a droopy sway bar hanging around as well just asking to get hung up on something.
The center muffler is also simply asking to get hung up or torn off, but I took care of that previously.
While I don't actually go off-roading in the strictest sense, no bouldering or 'rock crawling', I do find it irresistible to explore interesting back country dirt roads, forest service trails, old mining roads, etc, and it would just suck SOOO bad to have something critical eaten by a rock that I need to get back home with.
First on the menu were rocker bars from 4x4parts.com and a nudge bar from AnythingTruck.com. The former provided nice solid jacking locations all up and down the side of the vehicle (and yes they are strong enough to lift from, see in the pics below that I'm lifting the car from the rocker bars), and the latter dresses up the Mo's nose (the profile of which I've never really liked) and provides some really beefy mounting brackets from which to attach the skid plates.
So I asked around and found Bugformance, a local bay area VW shop, does custom work like skid plates for rally cars and the like. After throwing the Mo up on the lift and pointing and waving arms for a while, they went at it with gusto and turned out the pieces of art now bolted to the bottom of my Mo pictured below. All of the construction is of 3/16ths thick aluminum, except for the very front ram plate piece which is 1/4th inch thick. Cost is NOT for the faint of heart, all told it was about $1500, and I'm sure they didn't come close to billing me for all the man hours they actually spent on the project. But, damn, did they do a fine job or what?
-c
