Flareside Bed Rebuild

[jebadiah04]

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

 

[DNFXDLI]

Nice....what kind of wood are you going to use?

 

[Beach66Bum]

can't wait to see the new wood in!

 

[O'Rattlecan]

I can't see the pics while I'm at work (annoying), so I can't see what you're doing now, but look forward to seeing it at home.

What kind of wood was standard? It would probably have to be red oak, right?

Ryan

 

[jebadiah04]

Oak plywood is standard. Some butt nugget painted it black and totally ruined it.

here's today's progress.

Got the old wood out. It was unfortunate but I ended up grinding the majority of the bolts off. My latest head count for buying new bolts puts me at 54 carriage bolts...yikes.






Get it out do some measuring and sketch up the cross members.




make sure to double your measurements! Measure both ways and they should add up to total length of the bed

take the old wood off of the bed strips and the cross members.





stain the wood up. I went with pine I was going to do cedar nut decided against it after finding out it was 40 bucks a board! Anyways I needed 2 1x10s 2 1x8s and 2 1x12s widest are in the center and narrowest are on the edges. This actually lined up perfectly with the original metal strips.

Cut out the fenders on the outsides and stained the wood for its first coat. Then i did a pre assembly and a 2nd coat. I'm taking a break and going to do a 3rd coat and coat it with some marine grade spar varnish that I had left over from my diy wake skate!

I really wanted to sand down the metal strips and repaint but in the time crunch I have going on there is just no way I can take the time to do them. So they have to wait and I'll pull them out next rotation from work and re work them too.

 

[jebadiah04]

I also just noticed u can see one of my gouges for my lathe is chalking my boat trailer wheel. Hehe don't do that at home kids.

once i get it stained and varnish I'm going to throw some paint on the bottom of it to seal it in. No use going with spend shit when you can't see it and it will look crappy with road grime against the wood if it's not black. I also considered a bed liner but tthat will ruin any chances of pulling the strips and reworking them....bah choices. Paint it is.

its also not helping my cause that Iit is pouring rain. I'd really like to do a quick paint job on the inside of the box and the top of my cab but that is pretty much shot at this point

 

[DNFXDLI]

That looks good Tater.

 

[jebadiah04]

Now I'm waiting around for paint (well varnish) to dry so I can put it on the bed and spray the bottom of it. Then mount her up.





1.day left. I hope

 

[DNFXDLI]

Put it beside your furnace, that will dry it faster.

 

[jebadiah04]

Haha I tries that but I got all light headed. Hey, who brought the leprechauns?

 

[DNFXDLI]

Huffing it aren't you

 

[jebadiah04]

I've never huffed a leprechaun

 

[smokey]

That looks way better.

 

[smokey]

Gotta watch those leprechaun their mean little buggers.

 

[DNFXDLI]

I've never huffed a leprechaun

 

[O'Rattlecan]

Awesome work. Night & Day improvement.

Ryan

 

[jebadiah04]

I'll post up some pics of it in the truck. I've been busy so I keep forgetting

 

[DNFXDLI]

I'll be checking...

 

[jebadiah04]

Here u go Mr needy

 

[jebadiah04]

i just realized that pic is totally blurred out, hmm looked good on my phone. Ill snap up another one, then you can see where i put in i-bolts and what nots for tie downs, flareside beds have no tie downs, worst part about them.