Ok so the deal is that my 1950 has the 9 board bed its supposed to have but I am swapping beds with my parts 1953 because its in better shape. Is it easy to switch from 8 to 9 boards in that bed or do I have to disasemble each bed and swap the sides?
If you swap the whole bed, including crossmembers, you ahould be good to go. The crossmembers have holes in particular spots for 8 or 9 boards, otherwise you may have to re drill a few holes.
Thanks. If drilling a few holes is the hardest thing I will face in swapping back to 9 boards then thats going to be alot faster than taking both beds apart.
Root, 8 board or 9 board aside, the most important thing is the front crossmember and rear crossmember. Make sure they are solid, as they are the ones that really matter! They attach to the frame and will make all the difference in how the bed wood looks. All crossmembers are created equal, it's just a function of how many holes they have in them!
Agreed! I just finished kinda combining parts from two beds...I mean parts because when I parked my truck about 20 years ago, I had just found better sides. What I looked at....Important! If your truck was truly a hard working truck in the past life, some of those crossmembers might really be bent warped, bowed...tons. Loads did that to the three center crossmembers, big time. So, if you look down them and they are super bent warped,bowed, I would go back and pick the best of all you have and use those. Otherwise, you might put in a super neat bed only to find that it sits on your truck...warped. I actually straighted one or two by putting the weight of a vehicle on some...they need to be straight to look pruuuuddddyyy. In the past I did not care, but my truck is now in it's new life and will probably never carry one fifth the weight it has in the past. Remember, that you need the blocks and one of those crossmembers is a floating one...Why??? (you might ask) I'll cover that in the next post...can you guess? These trucks were Advance Design, but workers, workers, workers! What most of them do today is wimpy compared to what many of them have been through. My truck is in a renewed retirement sort of life, but doing some heavy duty time for it was not designed. Rod
