In The Beginning

When we first got it towed home we knew it was rough and was gonna be a lot of work, but that’s the kind of learning experience I was looking for when it came to trying to pass on some knowledge to my son about vehicles. I had collected parts of all sorts over the years, mainly trucks, and figured what better time to put some of that treasure pile to work for something good. So we got a truck and started in.  First order of business was to start taking things apart so we could get a better look at what we had to start with and start making plans and parts lists. We got a decent set of tools to start and I told him to start pulling things off and keep track of where all the parts and bolts go.

The Tear Down

Once we got all the of the garbage and spare parts out of the bed to find the bolts we realized there weren’t many bolts to take out. The whole bed virtually lifted up and came right off the truck. A lot of the bolts and hardware that were supposed to be holding it down were ether missing, rusted away, or rotted. There was one complete cross member just rattling around and wasn’t really attached to anything.

Notice the hole in the step on the side.  There is one on the other side to match.  This truck, or at least the truck this bed was on had stacks at one time in its life.  For the most part the body panels are fairly sound. They are definitely beat up a bit, and will surely take some work, but no cracks or major rust for the most part. Every bolt we tried to take out, to pull all the bed panels apart though are rusted tight and are gonna have to be ground or drilled to get them out and the bed disassembled completely.

The frame rails themselves don’t look too bad, but as you can see the crossmember is tweaked.  I’m sure this was used to yank another truck out of a stuck position, or get it’s self yanked out.  The front crossmember looks similar from pulling from the other end.  Also you can see the rear axle that came with the truck that we will not be using on re-assembly.  It will get added to the pile of other Eaton (HO52/72) axles that I have. There are some parts available for these things but they are few and they are expensive.  One of the sources I found to have some parts is TorqueKing.

Well that gets us through the first installment in this journey.  There should be much more to come if I can keep up with the updates on here as we are just getting started.