jebadiah04
Rooster Snorkler
- 849
- 27
The wood on the bed of my flareside was showing signs of rot, and the wooden (thanks ford) blocks they used as spacers were disintegrating and the bed was getting loose enough I ccould pull each bolt out about a half inch.
So I decided to pull the bed a re work some of those trouble areas.
I could not find any write ups what so ever so I decided to document my work and hopefully help somebody out in the future.
Step 1. Remove bolts holding the bed down.
This sounds easy enough...wrong! They are Philips heads and I could not turn them no matter what I tried. So I ground them all off. Thank god I live in the northwest where it always rains so the bed was full of water enough to prevent a fire. I also made sure and dump water on it when it started to look like injun smoke signals.
gonna need a couple of these...these bolts are tough!
Step 2. Remove tail light wiring and filler neck.
Simple enough. Cut wires where I spliced them together last time and boom done.
Step 3. Remove bed.
I used some redneck ingenuity, a engine hoist a few tie downs to lift er up and drive the truck out from under it.
Step 4. Tip bed on end, assess damage
it's really really light weight. So no issues there. A lot of the bolts are rusted pretty bad and there's about 300 of them. So I have to wait till tomorrow to break out air tools. The pits of living in a town. The wood would probably last another 25 years but the blocks under it are toast. Should have used metal. Oh well. I'll out more wood under there because in 25 more years I'll probably re do it again.
Pics to follow
So I decided to pull the bed a re work some of those trouble areas.
I could not find any write ups what so ever so I decided to document my work and hopefully help somebody out in the future.
Step 1. Remove bolts holding the bed down.
This sounds easy enough...wrong! They are Philips heads and I could not turn them no matter what I tried. So I ground them all off. Thank god I live in the northwest where it always rains so the bed was full of water enough to prevent a fire. I also made sure and dump water on it when it started to look like injun smoke signals.
gonna need a couple of these...these bolts are tough!
Step 2. Remove tail light wiring and filler neck.
Simple enough. Cut wires where I spliced them together last time and boom done.
Step 3. Remove bed.
I used some redneck ingenuity, a engine hoist a few tie downs to lift er up and drive the truck out from under it.
Step 4. Tip bed on end, assess damage
it's really really light weight. So no issues there. A lot of the bolts are rusted pretty bad and there's about 300 of them. So I have to wait till tomorrow to break out air tools. The pits of living in a town. The wood would probably last another 25 years but the blocks under it are toast. Should have used metal. Oh well. I'll out more wood under there because in 25 more years I'll probably re do it again.
Pics to follow
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