Sorry for the lack of updates, have been very busy prepping for the baby (due in one month!), slammed at work, and writing papers for school.
Fortunately, I have been still sacrificing my weekends in order to work on my truck, and have made a little bit of progress.
I succeeded in removing the old, stubborn steel bed floor, and the original front bed panel that was bent to hell:
Finally got to install new sheet metal on her, been waiting to do that for a long time.
Now that we have the bed squared up pretty good, we begin brainstorming how to mount it, and come up with this:
L shaped steel on each bed side, upside down (I know, it's hard to see in the pic)
And then this unistrut steel, which we will weld to the L brackets, and will then mount them to the frame.
Turns out, we'll only be raising the bed floor about two inches, which will barely be noticeable. I decided to use maple wood for the floor, but that will be a while.
We're taking this weekend off, but hopefully next weekend we'll have the bed fully mounted, and then we'll have to re-drill the mounting holes for the rear fenders (we moved the bed forward, there's maybe 1/4" gap between the back of the cab and front of the bed), and mount the running boards.
We did come across a problem with our frame shortening, we didn't go short enough. Instead of cutting the frame again, we're going to just move the axle forward in the leaf springs a couple of inches.
Getting closer to seeing it all together for the first time!
Keep in mind, the truck is in the air slightly in the image above, once it is sitting on the ground, it is pretty low even with the suspension height being stock.
Every effort was made to mount the body as low as we possibly could onto the frame, and with clearances as small as millimeters, we have achieved that.