Hey Questies,
Quite unusually for us we have had a couple of days progress in a row! I (Tris) have been giving our truck some love and attention, and generally making headway with getting her ready for the task we are asking her to perform.
I'd like to thank my father in law Michael. Doing these kind of jobs is so much easier when you have access to every tool you could ever want, and a brain that has done them before and can point you in the right direction without the need to spend hours on end watching youtube videos to work it out. Don't get me wrong, youtube has helped me often in the past, I couldn't tie my own shoelaces without watching a 'how to' video, but having someone answer questions and give advice is much better.
Also whilst I was having fun playing with the truck Zora was doing taxes and laundry and a hundred other things that I would prefer not to have to do, so thanks Mush.
The previous owners used it to tow a fifth wheel, so they had this big old bracket mounted in the bed, and it must have done some pretty bad damage to the paintwork over the years. You can kind of see the shape of where it was mounted from the rust spots. When we first bought her the bed had a mat over the top and a load of leaves and crud built up in the grooves of the bed. But a good scrub and a sweep and it came up nice. Fortunately most of the rust hadn't penetrated too deeply and the bed is fairly heavy duty metal. So as you can see the process was pretty simple; scrape the excess off with a wire brush and flat knife, take a drill with a wire brush head to get into all the cracks and make the metal shine a bit, use paint thinner to remove any rust dust and stain from around the worked areas, prime with an oil based paint, then finish with some white that Michael managed to find in his basement. Easy!
The other major job was mounting the Happijac tie down brackets. The bracket at the front had to be secured through the front wall of the bed and bolted through the bed onto the frame.
I've never drilled metal before, and man was it tough trying to get through the cross beams under the bed. In hindsight it may have been better to invest in some new bits. But get there we did, and for a pretty complicated installation it all went very smoothly. It's now ready to cinch our camper down!
I do have more to do. One nice thing about the truck is that it has nice big running boards, which makes getting in and out easy. However the coating which the struts supporting the boards are made from has obviously aged worse than the rest of the truck because it is all rusted to hell. I think that it is structurally ok but I'm going to have to strip and reseal what I can. If it falls off it doesn't really matter, it's just an luxury, but where some of the bolt holes are drilled into the frame of the truck rust has set in as well, and those beams support the weight of the bed! It's a good lesson for working on metal, make sure you seal around any holes you drill. I'm going to have to get into those and do what I can to stop the damage getting any further, especially close to the wheel arches where road spray keeps the metal wet. But that's a job for another day.
Oh and we also got new tyres (tires (the endless anglo-centric argument about spelling)) fitted! We are making progress!
