New Zealand Datsun Club

As the title says ive got a new project to start, I picked these up from will the other day and intend to build a daily driver by converting it to an EV
to do this simply without spending years doing so im going to use a nissan leaf motor at this stage and convert the ute to front drive with the battery pack under the tray. Wish me luck and ill try keep this updated.

Oh hell yeah, this is awesomeness, looking forward to updates!

Hell yeah do it!

WHAT no LS?

Good luck with the build

Well progress is slowly rolling on. There's been a change of plan. To everyone's joy it's going to be rear drive now. I plan to keep the front fairly stock except disk brakes and I'm working on a Rack and Pinion mod for it to get rid of the scary steering column. As for the rear the motor will be mounted in a late model pajeros subframe to keep the 6stud but allow for independent suspension. The batteries are lighter than I originally thought at 170kg meaning my plan is to put about 140kg in the engine bay in a custom alloy box then another 140kgish behind the cab meaning the range will nearly double. I have managed to find a crashed 2014 leaf at a good price but have to wait until the insurance is sorted with that before they can sell to me. The cab is off the get blasted on the 1st Feb then off to Wal to make it all beautiful.

Cab got blasted today then dropped off to Warrick for him do do him magic. Rust was a little worse than we thought but still worth saving.

Looking good, any Datsun a Datsun worth saving!

Very interesting and cool project, I shall be keepknb an eye on it.

Im really keen to see how this turns out. Can't wait to see the end result.

Chassis was blasted on friday, so gave it a coat of black zinc followed by chassis black this weekend. Still trying to get my hands on a crashed leaf that ive known about since newyears. In other news ive come to the conclusion that i should use the factory diff and just run the motor off the driveshaft, to do this i need a 2:1 reduction coming out of the leaf motor going into the 4.6 diff. The factory leaf has a reduction of 8:1 roughly. for a 2:1 reduction i can either connect the motor to a transmission with the correct second gear ratio but id rather not have a full transmission in there just for one gear. so i found a transfercase from a d21 navara with a low gear of 2:1 but im a little worried it may be noisy as its only designed to spin up to 4000rpm not 10000rpm. Im open to any other suggestions at this stage.

Great work. Would it be possible to lock the diff in a leaf trans (in a legit way), have to motor/trans north-south with a small driveshaft from one of the original axles back to a hanger bearing? Didn't realize those motors spun that fast!