I test drove a Nissan Titan yesterday and I was really impressed with the way it drove. It had tons of power and rode really well. But when I looked underneath I was really disappointed with how wimpy it looked underneath. It sure does have a weak looking rear axle for all that power and towing capacity. So why does a Ford with a slightly less powerful engine and similay towing capacity have much heavier running gear? I was kind of disappointed, It seems that the Ford is really made much more heavy duty. I guess I'll stick with a new ford when I am ready to buy. One thing I would like to know is how that wimpy rear axle under the Nissan could hold up with all that power and towing capacity?

 

It seems that they are having alot of problems with it latey and also with there rotors warping,

which rear-ends fail the most TT clicky

and this thread is also a good read.


After 4 diff's I finally figured out why they failed linky

it seems that nissan under sized the rear end and alot of them failing.

That truck may go fast but they did not beef it up to handle the duties of a full size truck.

 

What I honestly don't get is why they (Nissan) put that rear end in the first place.
Here, where we recieve the Nissan Patrol (similar in size to the Explorer) - it has a 10.5" Nissan rear end.
That axle is used in trail rigs with supercharged big blocks running 44" tyres, and I am yet to see one break.
It wasn't as if they couldn't have just got that from the parts catalogue...

 

thats an easy one to answer....to save weight, inorder to have a fast truck they needed to trim whereever they could.

 

to save weight
And costs...
Pity though, I like fierce competition, but this shows no manufacturer is immune to problems.

 

Exactly, that is what makes that truck faster. Being that all everone heard was how fast the titan is.

 

Well said, competition is what makes the vehicles you and I buy what they are. I know I'm not the only Ford fan that was genuinely angry and sad when Chevy axed the Camaro. You can bet that Nissan will probably remedy the diff problem quickly!

 

I will admit that the dana 44 is undersized for that truck but the rest of the truck is well built and it also has a very beefy fully boxed frame similar to the ford.
Due to its higher rear ratios it is supposedly stronger than a traditional dana 44.
They had alot of early 04 failures due to under filling with lube but nissan added the aluminum finned cover and synthetic fluid to 05 and later models.
The brake problem has been adressed as well using thicker rotors and a different pad material.

 

King i'm aware of the low fluid issue (as are most Titan owners are) and the replacement finned covers that they have had the owners switched too inorder to keep the rear end from overheating , but still the rear ends still continue to come apart for no reason. Many owners have babied it and not hot rodded it or even towed a heavy load, and those that have used it to its rated towing ability are also have problems.

Nissan used a rear end that is lighter duty rear end inorder to save weight, the F150's rear is beefer and weighs more than the titans, even the frame is heavier on a Ford than the titans cause Ford has learned over time where not to cut corners.

Curious as to how the ratios play into this? I don't think gear ratios have any thing to do with strengh of a rear-end Axle thinkness, bearing sizes, and housing dia. and the ring and pinion gear and teeth thinkness is what determinds how strong a axle is.

if i am wrong on this please enlighten me...

 

Im not sure how it works. Armada which is also a menber here can explain it much better than me, but it had somthing to do with them having the higher ration[lower numerically] that gives them extra room to play with as far as making the ring and pinion stronger.
Hopfully he will chime in and pick up from there. I agree fords rear is much tougher than the dana in the titan but I dont think the ford has a huge if any advantage in the frame department. Alot of new 150s have suffered from vibration problems and some say its linked to the frame. Both of them seem to be overkill since the C channels in the older 150s have held up just fine.

 

What KingLariat said is correct...
If you only reduce it numerically less (the majority of the Titans gear reduction is done in the transmission), you can make your pinion and ring gears larger for a given load.
However you also have higher input torques - due to greater gear reduction in the transmission - it does still work though, but the pay off isn't as great as initially imagined.

 

okay, do you have any links with more info on this?

and what happened to your sig? its not showing up?

 

I don't have a link, but this effectively what Nissan is able to do.
The D44 is a casing size. Inside that your Ring gear is limited in its size by the casing.
If you have say 4.10 gears you will be running a 45 teeth ring gear, and an 11 teeth pinion.
In Nissans case they are running a 2.94 or a 3.357 rear ratio. Which means they are running a 14 teeth pinion, and a 41 and 47 teeth ring gear respectively.
The amount of torque that a rear end can recieve is generally limited by the size of the pinion gear (as it has much less teeth to take the stress).
Having a 14 teeth pinion enables it to take substantially more torque than a conventional D44. This assumes that bearings, axle shafts etc. have been compensated for.
In the case of the Titans, the owners are generally experiencing a lack of drive, which generally means that teeth have been sheared off the pinion gear - usually due to load and heat.
This kind of indicates its Dana's problem (thier quality control in my experience is woeful). I am guessing that Dana have not had success in consistantly meeting the metalurgical specs that Nissan have given them - subsequently you get some that fail with little load, and some that have been increasing output of the engine, and towing 9000lbs and have been fine.

Having said this, thier problems could be easily solved by going to a bigger rear end.

As for my sig not working, I try (but usually forget) to turn it off if I have already posted in a thread (more so in this forum as everyone that frequents this forum has seen it a lot), just my little bit to try and reduce bandwidth, don't know if it does anything, but hey...

See, it works now

 

Hi all. I'm back after getting hit pretty hard by Katrina. You guys have covered the topic pretty well. The D-44 variant is stronger than the standard D-44 because of the greater number of teeth on the pinion gear as stated. Also, these gears are not interchangable, as the Nissan variant is not 8.5 inch ring gear, but almost 9 (8.9 something inches).

I realize that is not as strong as a D-60 nor as strong as the bigger Sterling diffs. I think they will probably stay with this diff in the 1/2 ton trucks. It's not just that it is lighter, but that it provides more ground clearance. Considerably more.

All I can say about durability is that I have a 4x4 Armada Off Road that weighs over 5600 lbs. empty and well over three tons with more than one occupant or any cargo inside. I tow an 8,000 trailer with it regularly and at over 23,000 miles, now, have had no problems.

There seems to be a pattern emerging with the Titan failures. Most of them are in trucks with Nissan's e-locker, and the failures seem to be centering around that locker or with premature failure of the spider gears in the open diffs, rather than the ring and pinion. This points toward quality control from Dana on those parts.

Also, there seem to be almost no failures reported in Armadas. The ring and pinion are the same, but the rear diff in the Armada has independent suspension.

Truthfully, I don't know why a few have had failures and the ones who have problems tend to be very vocal. If you check the threads for F-150's you'll see a bunch of ring gear failures on those trucks, preceded by complaints of a lot of rear end noise. I believe that was traced to a problem with ring gears not machined to proper tolerance and has since been corrected.

I have said before that the F-150 is a nicer truck, especially in its Lariat trim, than the Titan, but the drive train of the Nissan, especially the engine and tranny are very seductive. I just haven't seen anything out there to compare to that 32 valve DOHC V8 and 5 speed electronic tranny.

To me, he perfect light truck would be a F-150 with that Nissan engine and transmission.

 

Amda , just to keep this thread on track, the discussion is about the titan rear end ,and the test drive.

It seem that nisan made a unwise choose in the type of rear-end, why would you put less of a rear end in a truck? the failure are more common than what you hear about on the forums, in a truck strengh is what it is about, not speed , not failure of the third member. Nissan did very well with its small truck market, but they seemed to be a little short sighted about the full sized version.

Given the number of trucks sold an awful lot of issues are being found, ones that should have never been a problem in the first place.