We have been lucky enough on the east coast to have a pretty mild winter. This meant that we could really get work done AND enjoy our customs/classics throughout the winter (now I know what you west coast folks enjoy!). This meant that there was a month where I didn’t get much done on Project Pile House. As the weather gets warmer and talk our our 2012 Eastwood Summer Classic stirs, I have really gotten the motivation to make some progress on the truck. Since we’ve already tackled getting the cab and front sheet metal mounted and stretched the bed sides, I decided to to build a new bed frame.
The bed didn’t fair nearly as well as the rest of the truck, and there wasn’t much left of the bed floor. In the end I pretty much ended up cutting it all out to build new. I decided to firm the bed up by using a mix of angle iron and square box tubing. This allows me to have a nice base for the floor when it comes time to finish the bed. Since I was welding together fairly thick steel, I decided to pull out our MIG 175 and weld up the bracing on 220V. I first ground off the surface rust where I was welding the angle iron to the bedsides. I then hit up the entire perimeter of the bed where the new metal would overlap with Self Etching Weld Thru Primer to assure that the work I’m doing wouldn’t rust out. Even though the truck is currently a Patina-Queen, I still want any work I do to last the life of the truck!
With any custom vehicle, you will run into unexpected snags throughout the build. One thing I wanted to avoid was the “shallow bed effect” that you see on many lowered or classic trucks (especially ones with modern chassis). I want to actually be able to put more than a lawn chair in the bed! In order to do that I needed to move the OE chassis cross member forward a few inches to get it sitting below the bed floor. By doing this it also made the driveshaft uncomfortably close to the bottom of the cross member. I decided to notch and box the cross member before welding it back into the chassis. I may also need to cut down the top of the frame a small amount over the rear axle to keep the bed floor level, but we will tackle that later.
From there I made mounts that tied the new floor frame into the S10 chassis and now it is a “bolt-on affair” to install the bed. With all of that done I began working on getting the rear of the truck sitting where I wanted when “aired out”. Due to time constraints and to keep the ‘budget-build” theme, I decided to ditch some of the leafs, install drop blocks, and build a cheap bag-on-bar air suspension setup in the rear. I don’t plan to race the truck or build a high horsepower engine (yet!), so I went this route. Stay tuned as I continue working on the rear suspension and begin to get this old truck rolling again!
-Matt/EW
