1960 Nissan Patrol

This first-generation Nissan Patrol 4W66, a 1960 model, was acquired in November 2021 and fully restored through March 2026, following a staged plan that ran from mechanical recovery through sheet metal, primer, electrics, paint, accessories and upholstery. We carried out a frame-off disassembly: the vehicle was completely stripped at the workshop of our lead mechanic and the complete chassis was sandblasted to bare metal, with specific chassis ends and stress points reinforced by welding before the frame was repainted.

The truck retains its original-specification Nissan overhead-valve inline-six, removed and fully disassembled for a specialized rebuild with a remanufactured camshaft and a full set of new internal components. The centerpiece of the body restoration was the rear cargo bed: the original had been altered decades ago in Colombia, as was common practice, so we replicated the correct first-generation bed in steel — using an unrestored original 4W66 owned by a local collector as the reference, photographed and measured directly, together with period factory sales literature.

The body was repainted in Sora Blue, a period-correct light blue chosen from the factory Datsun colour chart — a soft sky blue that suits the truck's early-1960s character. Throughout the restoration we kept a close eye on first-generation originality, studying 1959–1960 4W66 brochures and using those references to guide the bed replication, badges and trim, restoring details like the foot steps that had been lost to local conversions decades ago.

The 4W66 is the last series of the first-generation Patrol, built at the very end of the line before the 60-series succeeded it — a short-lived model, and one that leaves correct references and parts genuinely scarce. Getting those details right took the restoration a long way from the workshop: we tracked down an unrestored original in Colombia to measure, worked from period factory literature, and spoke with the Nissan Heritage Foundation in Japan about the truck.