Bed Floor Repair… part 2!

Floor and More — Ronny Jordan

So much rust. So many patches. On my last post I’d started the inside of the bed. I started with the worst. The driver’s side front of the bed only needed 4 small patches and one bigger one.

Some of you may see the next picture and think I have poor taste in beverages. You’ll have to get over it. I know it’s like “sex on a boat”. You can ask me what that means if you don’t already know. Regardless, it’s not about taste. This isn’t a box for beer. It’s a template kit!

It is just the right thickness and stiffness for making templates!

Here are a few:

After cutting out the templates, I cut some patches out of my sheet metal.

Here you can see the drivers front part of the bed support all finished up.

Onward to the passenger side! There were a few holes to plug weld here and there. they aren’t very interesting, but I took care of those things as I traversed around the bed.

Never underestimate how many times the floor gets swept… and yet it always seems to be covered in grinding dust and welding bbs.

The bad part on the passenger side was where the fenderwell meets the bed. The inside of the “hump” if you will.

By “bad” I mean part is missing completely and what was left… isn’t much better.

I decided to basically just cut this section out.

I cut a strip of sheet metal to replace the “wheel well” part. I used some fancy clamps that give a good gap for butt welding body parts. They hold the metal alignment right while you weld it in.

For this kind of patch, stich weld it in. Do a little inch long weld here, a little weld there, letting it pretty much cool before going back and filling in more. Here are my crappy (not quite hot enough) welds. I know they weren’t hot enough because I could see the back side wasn’t fully fused. I’ll have to go back and weld inside the wheel well. that can be for another day.

I also needed to make the “lip” part that the bed panels lay on top of. I don’t have a brake big enough to bend the sheet this long, so I had to do it by hand on my welding table.

Here is’t almost coaxed into place.

I’ll use these holes to plug weld it to the strip I added on the “hump”.

Looks pretty good fitted up there…

Nearly seamless…

…and as murphy would have it! As usual! I ran out of shielding welding gas just as I got started welding it into place. Probably a good stopping place for a bit.