Finishing the bed and removing runflats....

[87V20Kansan]

The truck sat out in the weather untouched for a couple of months because it doesn't fit in my little 2 car garage at my house in suburbia. A friend of mine recently moved to a place with a shop so work has resumed! I finally got it out of the paint booth over Christmas and I had every intention of doing a Linex in March. That never materialized because life happens. The more I stewed about it, the more I leaned toward a cheaper option.

The floor in this bed is really pretty far gone. It has holes from an ancient fifth wheel plate that was bolted in. All of the area where that plate was bolted is rusted with a fair amount of deep pitting. It has a Taiwanese repop passenger bedside that I should have known better than to use. I began to dislike the idea of wasting $700 on a sprayed in bedliner, knowing one day I will eventually need to replace the bed. So for about $175 I sprayed the bulkhead and sides with heavy duty undercoating that cures out fairly hard and dropped a heavy bed mat over the funky floor. Eyesore solved!

Before:





After: (Sorry about the horrible glare.)





I tried three times. Once with dynamic, and once with roadforce balancing on a top of the line Hoffman balancer. One more time with centrimatics and I still couldn't get the runflats to balance on the H1 tires. So out they came! We scaled the wheel and tire assembly before and after to see what the weight loss was. The runflats weigh 39 lbs a piece. You are correct in assuming that removing them made a significant difference in how the truck accelerates. They also balanced right out with no more than 6 ozs per wheel.



A friend gave me these center caps. I found a site that sells conversion lug nuts to run the late model Chevy center cap with their plastic retention caps that thread over the outside of the nuts. Just like a stock late model GM lug nut, but with 9/16" threads instead of 14mm.

[bake74]

     Nice cheap alternative for the bed.  I built a Dodge 1 ton rock crawler with portal axles and H1 wheels and tires, we never could get the run flats to balance properly, we finally said screw it.  It was a trailer queen to the trails anyway, it was not street legal, so we never really got it over 40 mph.

[87V20Kansan]

I hear ya Bake. I'm not concerned about the runflat portion so I said forget it too. We cut them out with a sawzall. I run this one on the highway from time to time and I needed to balance them. The wife can't be spilling her coffee at 52mph! There is a place called Trail Worthy Fab in Wichita Ks that sells pvc inserts that do away with the runflat and allow you to still lock the beads when you reassemble the wheels. I think eventually I'll do those. P.S. - Thanks for the bed compliment.

[87V20Kansan]

In the bed project I also wanted to have some cargo light so I added this LED kit from an electronics distributor I have an account with here in town. Fairly pleased with it. Two lights like these found their way into the tool box as well. Switching for this, and future lighting projects, is in place of the factory ash tray.

[sphinx]

Neat idea for putting switches in the ashtray.  What do the two 45ACP control?

[LTZ C20]

Pedestrians lol & idiot drivers.

[sphinx]