Bed progress

Here are a few pictures of the progress being made on the bed..

Here you can see the drivers side bed walls are pretty much finished, however the passenger side still has some work to do. You may notice a weld line going down the center of the inner wheel tub. It turns out that the inner wheel tub was actually smaller by about an inch which was causing the entire bed side to be out of alignment. After Joe and his crew took more measurements and made a few cuts and welds, we were back in business.

This is the outside of the bed wall. You can see the weld line on the inner tub as well as a few cuts and spots where Joe has been shrinking and banging on the metal to straighten it out.

After all of the metal has been straightened as much as possible, a layer of bondo is applied to the bed side to fill in any high and low spots.

After it dries, more sanding is done, and additional bondo is added again.. This is generally the process.. Add bondo and filler, sand it off, look for imperfections, then go at it again. Its definitely an art.

Here's what the inside of the passenger side looks like after its been sanded and bondo applied.

More bondo is applied to the inside of the inner wheel tub which needs to be hand sanded as Joe doesn't have a sander that can handle these kind of angles.

Here is the inner wheel tub on the drivers side.. Its getting closer. Primer was sprayed on the tub to help find trouble spots then more sanding will be done on it.

To add a little more reinforcement and to help finish off the inside of the stepside, a metal plate was added to each inside of the step.

Here you can see both plates have been added to the step. Because we're planning on making the bed wood tilt up so you can see the frame under it we need to finish off areas of the bed that were never intended to be seen.

Another example of an area of the bed that looks unfinished is the rear of the bed below the tail gate.

After tacking on a piece of metal over the unfinished portion of the bed you can see it looks a lot nicer.

Here is the other side of the bed. Notice a bolt hole was added already on this one.. This is where the outside fender attaches to the bed.