Last week we took off on a little family adventure. It was 8 days total, 4000 miles driven, lots of cool stops along the way and I met a new friend. Leading up to our vacation I took a chance and contacted Kyle @ C10Acres on Instagram. For those who have not heard of Kyle, you will probably hear of him soon. He is a super talented guy and does phenomenal work shortening bed sides. We talked for a while and Kyle agreed to work on my bedsides and what was even more cool is he agreed to get them done during our stay in the Phoenix area.
He started on the bed sides on Friday evening and I picked them up at 7pm on Sunday evening. He has this procedure down to a science but he found an old and ****ty hidden repair in the drivers side that was unexpected. He was still able to get them done and get us on the road as scheduled.
Another cool thing to me is he was able to save/shorten my existing side trim and re-installed the rear marker lights. I know some people wouldn't waste their time having bed sides shortened but it is important to me to use as much of the original truck as possible. The original sheet metal is much thicker and for me it's just much cooler to use the original stuff. Here are a few pictures of the process.
Passenger side cut lines taped up
clamped together and ready to be welded
And here is the passenger side welded up and metal finished.
The driver's side had a little existing damage right behind the bumper from what looked like a small rear end accident. Kyle called me to let me know when he starting cutting on the panel in this area, he ran into an ugly repair that had a lot of bondo. He put his head down and fixed something that I didn't think could be fixed. I really thought thought we were dead in the water at this point but as you can see in the following pictures, the man is talented.
Here is what he ran into
And here they are finish welded and the marker lights welded back in.
I couldn't be happier with Kyle's work and like I said, I got a new friend out of the situation.
Now its back to reality which means I need to finish wiring this garbage and get it on the road.