Spent most of the last few weeks helping my dad with stuff and doing some long-putoff work around my house.
Got some work done on Friday and Saturday though, but for some darn reason this editor isn’t working right and I can’t paste into it anymore.
The tray was in worse condition than I thought. It’s been a long time since it was empty, not really beyond saving, but not really worth it either:
Anywhere you see holes is paper thin and rotten underneath and I am glad that I went with the aluminium one to replace it instead of getting it repaired.
All ten bolts did not survive removal, I had to cut four of them and the other six put up a real fight but snapped. We shimmied the bed off the back until it tipped onto the ground and then flipped it. Then we flipped it again.
Definitely seen some use, but time to retire.
Now my truck’s butt is in the buff for the first time in what I suspect is over 40 years. I can’t help but think it would’ve been a lot easier to weld on those frame patches if I’d decided to replace the bed years ago instead of only recently.
While the patches look large, the inner rails in those areas had several small rust perforations and it was easier to just do two big patches instead of a bunch of small ones. That represented the worst of the frame rot.
This frame continues to impress considering both age and where it has lived, here’s some nice black paint on it.
We didn’t get the new bed on, the frame needs a lot of cleanup (most of that light brown on the outer rails is dirt, not rust) and a good slathering of por-15 before that can happen. That’s tomorrow’s thing. There’s some bulges in the outer rails in a few places from flaking rust off the inner ones that I’ll need to dig out and hammer the outers back flat too. According to a tape measure it is 3/16″ out of square but I’m not concerned, entire frame’s out by about 3/8″ assuming this is a continuation of what we knew for the front half. Probably due to whatever event pushed the driver’s side running board in a little. The truck tracked straight the last time I had it on a road and was hands-off and it’s not like there’s much adjustment to be had for wheel alignment, especially on the rear so I’m not really concerned about it.
On Saturday the rear bumper that I’ve hated from the start finally found itself unwelded from the frame. Originally something was bolted to at leas the bottom sets of two holes on that rear crossmember, but I don’t know what since the bumperettes don’t look like they’d fit. I’d like to get an original hitch if possible and maybe build a better bumper from that.
After that I removed the spare tire carrier/winch crossmember, all four bolts and nuts survived, which left both my father and I quite surprised. Not that they’ll be re-used, but they still turned!
The winch is slagged and its bolts did not survive. I think I remember reading somewhere the one on either a Tundra or a 100 series is more or less identical and should work. I don’t really know of anywhere else to mount a spare on this thing without making it look like its having an identity crisis about what word comes after Land in the model name or lose bed space. Not like I have a spare wheel and tire for it right now but it’ll have to be something at some point.
Main reason it came off was to make cleaning around these a little easier. Water gets trapped in between the three layers of steel and flaking caused a lot of bulging. Impossible to get the needle scaler or a flapdisk wheel in there so that’s why you se a bag of blasting media in an earlier picture. Next weekend, I hope.
As for the next major rot zones I present to you the areas the bumper was welded to, which included not bolting or welding in those two holes on each side but did include a blob of weld all the way around the outside of where the bumper met frame. This trapped water in an area water normally does not get trapped (the holes are supposed to be closed off with rivets and I don’t get why whichever PO that did this didn’t just drill holes in the bumper’s mounting tabs and bolt it to the frame where the rivets used to be. One of the two small pieces of inner rail that provide extra support there is missing as well, I need to fabricobble a replacement.
Dad used the welder to touch up some holes in the rearmost crossmember, but I’m thinking that some 3/16″ reinforcements are going to find themselves welded in there since the original material is getting thin due to questionable decisions made by a previous owner. Once that’s done and the butt end of the frame’s cleaned up, nothing will ever be welded on here again.
While he was working on cutting off the bumper and cleaning up the frame with a flapdisk, I went to town with a needle scaler on the crossmember:
We wrapped up for the week after this point. I just started a new job down in Mississauga and am commuting like some kind of madman for the near term. Gonna be a Saturdays and Sundays project for a bit but we’re getting close, just have to clean up and rust-protect the frame, mount the bed, and start putting parts back on.
