Friday, May 26, 2006  -  It was a slow day at work today, so I took the afternoon off to tinker around the shop a little. Since it was a gorgeous day outside, I decided to get started stripping the bed out in the driveway.

Here's the passenger side completely cleaned up. This side of the box is in excellent shape, with only a couple minor dings and absolutely no rust, aside from a tiny bit of pitting along the top bedrail. This box does have trim holes for the lower trim panels (since this came from a Ranger), and will need to be filled up. There are also a few dings around the taillight, but I was able to pop them out about 98%, and will use filler to finish them up.

Fig. 1

The driver's side is a different story. You can see a discolored patch along the top....that's some rust pitting, and that area is also indented a tiny bit. I should be able to push it back out from inside the box. You can also see where a previous owner has drilled holes for a side-mounted CB antenna, so these will need to be welded up.

Fig. 2

The area behind the left/rear tire will also need a little work. The panel was apparently bashed in at some point, and the previous owner did some amateur bodywork by drilling holes for a slide-hammer and popping most of it out, but then slathering a thick layer of body filler over the whole mess. I cleaned all the old filler out and will have to spend some time with a hammer and dolly attempting to finish what he didn't.

Fig. 3

Sunday, May 28, 2006  -  Although I had a shop today planned for today, I really didn't know what I was going to do, I just wanted to take advantage of a nice afternoon. I spent some time evaluating the condition of the box, trying to figure out if I was going to completely replace the floor panel or just cut and weld some patch panels in. After much consideration, I finally decided that the floor would be saved and I'd just use patch panels for the few areas that needed attention.

Fig. 4

Fig 5

Fig. 6

Fig. 7

Fig. 18 on the previous page and Fig. 4 at left shows the bed floor in all it's glory. A pile of garbage had been in the box and it had been setting there for several years, holding moisture and pitting the floor panel pretty good. However, even with the pitting, the floor still appears to be very solid. In Fig. 5 you can see where I took one of the 3M composite stripping wheels and spent about 30 seconds stripping a small test section of the floor, and after seeing that it was only pitted a little underneath, it was decided to keep the panel floor panel and just patch the two rusty areas as follows:

In Fig. 4 you can see how the trailing edge of the floor panel is rusted out in several spots. Also the left/rear flat section of the bed floor was rusted a little where it attaches to the back of the wheelwell. This, plus the fact that the rear of the bed support was bent up, made me decide to use my parts truck bed to cut a patch panel to replace all these areas. I would also need to weld in a small patch panel at the very front of the bed floor, around the left/front bed-mount bolt hole, where it was rusted out (Fig. 7). Since I'm planning on coating the entire bed with a roll-on bedliner, and since this truck will being fixed up as a daily driver and not a show truck anyway, I wasn't overly concerned with the appearance. By the time I got the patch panels welded in and the welds ground down, and then covered with the bedliner, they'd be virtually invisible anyway.

So anyway, I decided that today's job would be to get the box inside the shop and to get started cutting out the rusty area at the rear of the box and to get a patch panel cut out and ready to weld in.

It was a full day's worth of work. The pictures shown here detail the progress, which took a grand total of 12 straight hours. There was a great deal of time spent trimming the rear patch panel. I had to attempt to install it, then remove and trim a bit, and repeat as necessary, which was at least a ka-jillion times, if not more. The time was well-spent though, as by the time I called it a night the patch panel fit perfectly, and is ready to weld into place.