With the truck self propelled again and the front half reassembled, the bed started getting attention. It was painted on its portable dolly, the truck backed up under it, and the bed lowered in place and bolted down. With the intention of using the truck both as a daily driver and long distance vacation vehicle, a Gaylord hard cover was ordered up. Having never seen it done before, I always intended to mount the fuel fill in the driver side bed wall, near the top of the fender, concealing and securing the gas cap under the bed cover.
As seen here a 1967 C10 filler neck was mounted with a sealed cap to keep fumes out of the closed bed. The roll over/vent valve was located next to the filler neck. A local muffler shop bent up a piece of exhaust tubing to connect the neck to the gas tank.
The setup worked perfectly - except - for one design flaw. When I designed the tank, I had them fabricate an inlet elbow on top of the tank (circled in photo).
The radius of the turn was too short, and unless the tank was filled at dead slow, gas would kick back, shutting off the pump nozzle. It could take 15-20 minutes to load 33 gallons of fuel. This misery was discovered on our shake down 2000 mile trip to California. There was plenty of room for a less restrictive inlet, I just hadn’t considered the short radius neck a potential problem.
Jumping out of sequence, here’s a shot of the connecting pipe and how well it fit under the fender:
To retain the side fill arrangement, I needed to either replace the elbow on the tank with a baloney slice opening on top, or relocate the inlet to the side of the tank. Either repair would have allowed fuel to freely enter.
By the time I discovered the problem the truck was my daily driver and I lived 40 miles from town, so I couldn’t afford to be without it long enough to pull the tank and have a radiator shop modify the opening. Instead I pulled the tank, filled it with water, cut a new hole and installed an aircraft gas cap directly through the floor. The tank was dried out, refilled and reinstalled in time for work on Monday.
I was really disappointed the side fill didn’t work out, since it was very convenient to access and would have worked fine if the tank opening was modified. I’ve never seen anyone else install the filler in this location, which is a very clean solution and avoids the problems associated with a floor fill.
Back to the bed, since the floor was going to be hidden under the cover I didn’t want to waste money on a fancy wood floor, so I installed ¾ marine plywood soaked in fiberglass resin covered with a sheet of aluminum diamond plate. The bed being wider than plywood, two filler strips were installed under the angle strips and a single sheet filled in the floor. The diamond plate was simply bolted down on top. Being polished aluminum, it was very striking when first installed and remained shiny for many years after.
