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You are here: Home My Truck Projects The '68 Choptop Page 13
Back to My '68 Choptop Project Index
Page 13
Constructing a Home-made Rear Rollpan

June 17, 2007  -  Well, I got to spend my birthday today in the shop getting some more work done. I'd decided some time back to remove the rear bumper from the choptop and install a rollpan in it's place, to clean up the back end a bit, and make it smoother. Yes, I could have spent the $200 to get a pre-made ready-to-install pan at several of the aftermarket vendors, but since my choptop project is a effort at penny-pinching, I decided to make my own....and it's really not that hard!

What got me interested in making my own rollpan was the comment from a member of the FORDification forums that the top bedside of our '67-'72 trucks is a perfect candidate, since the curvature and angles are perfectly matched to those of the back of the box, where the rollpan will be installed. All you have to do is cut off a section approximately 67-1/2" to 68" wide, and down to the seam between the upper and lower bedside. (Fig. 01)

The top part of the upper bedside will become the bottom of the rollpan. You can see in Fig. 03 how the curvature of the bedside has an identical curvature of the bed endcaps.


Fig. 01 - This is the section of the upper bedside that was recycled from my rusted-out box.


Fig. 02 - Here's a view of the section cut out and barely roughed in to the right dimensions.

Fig. 03 - Here's another view after it was flipped over. The rusty area by my hand is where the upper and lower besides were spot-welded together.
Fig. 04 - I cut out a small section of leftover bedside to mold into a template. The only modification I made was to bend a wide lip across the top, where it will attach to the flat panel at the back of the bed, under the tailgate.
Fig. 05 - I'm holding the template up against the L/S endcap, to illustrate the similarities of the two. However, I did modify this template a little bit to allow the upper mounting lip to be more horizontal. You can also see where the rollpan will interfere with the tailgate hinges' lower bolts, so the flat panel under the tailgate will be slightly notched to allow easier access to the bolt.
Fig. 06 - Here's an altered version of Fig. 03. This shows where the upper section was trimmed off. It turned out to be perfect to use for the rollpan's top mounting bracket, attaching the top lip of the rollpan to the flat panel under the tailgate.
Fig. 07 - Here's the new mounting bracket trimmed off and attached under the tailgate. I initially just attached it with three sheetmetal screws, which gave me the flexibility to adjust it's position. The top edge of the rollpan will lay down on top of this and get welded on.
Fig. 08 - Now I needed to bend the upper lip of the rollpan. Since I didn't figure anyone in town had a 68" bending brake, I was on my own. I ended up clamping some heavy 1/4" steel on one side of the rollpan to use as the bending die, and a piece of angle iron to the other side for support, and then clamped them all down in the bench vice. Since the sheetmetal was so thick, I could only bend a little at a time, going back and forth, until I finally had my 90-degree bend. I almost ripped the bench vise out doing this, and had to reinforce the workbench top a little.
Fig. 09 - Once I got my top mounting lip bent, I did a quick mockup. As you can see, the lip will need trimmed down to allow it to mount flush.
Fig. 10 - Since the front edge of this upper lip will be up against the flat panel under the tailgate, it needed to be a straight cut. And since I was using a 4-1/2" angle grinder with a cut-off wheel to do the cut, I needed a straight-edge to keep the cutoff wheel from wandering around. So the steel that was used as the bending die in Fig. 08 became the straight-edge.
Fig. 11 - Just a quick view of the cut using the steel straight-edge, which worked out perfectly.
Fig. 12 - After trimming down the upper mounting lip, I had to grind each end of the rollpan for a snug fit side-to-side, and then I mocked it into place. In this shot it's just sitting there...wedged between the bed endcaps on each end, with the top lip of the rollpan resting on the mounting bracket shown above in Fig. 07.
Fig. 13 - A view of the backside of the rollpan shows how I had to notch the flat panel below the tailgate, to allow me access to the lower tailgate hinge bolt (yellow arrow). It's still a tight fit, but access to that bolt would have been virtually impossible without the notch. You can also see the shiny sheetmetal screw (which holds the mounting bracket) poking through that flat panel.
Fig. 14 - Once I verified that the rollpan wouldn't interfere with normal tailgate functions, I removed the tailgate and then drilled four holes down through the rollpan's mounting lip and the mounting bracket, and attached it via sheetmetal screws. Then I removed everything from the truck, so that I could weld the bracket to the rollpan. I drilled 15-20 evenly-spaced holes across the lip down to (but not through) the mounting bracket, and spotwelded the two together through those holes, as well as running a bead across the back where they meet. This shot was taken about halfway through this process.
Fig. 15 - Once the mounting bracket was solidly welded to the rollpan and the welds ground down smooth, it was time for final assembly. The holes for the sheetmetal screws holding the mounting bracket to the flat panel below the tailgate were drilled out larger, and the top portion of the rollpan was tightened down with bolts and nuts.
Fig. 16 - Each end of the rollpan was then welded onto the bed endcaps.

And no smart comments about my ugly welds are necessary....trust me, I know! It's just very difficult...at least for me...to weld sheetmetal with a 175-amp MIG without burning through, especially if there's any kind of gap between the two pieces. Oh well, these will be ground down smooth anyway.

Fig. 17 - The welds were ground down smooth on each side, and then I stripped the rollpan to bare metal in preparation for paint.
Fig. 18 - This is as far as I got this evening. The filler is applied to each side where the welds were ground down, as well as a thin filler layer across the top. When I return for another shop day, I'll sand these areas down, and the rest of the truck will be ready to paint!
 

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