Back to Work!

This truck wasn't touched for all of October and was starting to look lonely in the garage. Yesterday I found a little time to make a bit of progress. I finished taking the bed off and hauled it to a body shop to get the new bedsides welded on. While it's there I'll be able to work on the exposed chassis.

There's a big bulky ugly class IV hitch installed which someone decided to weld to the frame as well as bolt it on. I'll be removing that. I don't plan on towing and if I did I won't need a hitch that big... I can just use the bumper ball mount. This truck is only rated to pull 3500Lbs so it will be adequate in the rare scenario that I hook up a utility trailer or whatever. The hitch wiring was a bit of a mess and was spliced in a few places to tie in the camper wiring. I'll be pulling all of that out.

The frame has some minor rust but it's in pretty decent shape. I'll clean it up and hit it with some paint or rocker guard or both. The springs are badly corroded and one leaf is broken so I'm getting replacements made. Also there are some heavy duty bump stops which were installed to help support the weight of the camper. I'll be removing those as they limit axle articulation and are unnecessary at this point. I'd also like to sandblast the axle and hit that with some paint as well.