It’s time to disconnect and remove the bed from the truck. After it was removed, it was sold since we installed a new service body on the chassis. As you can see from the photos (you may click on them for a larger image), there was a one ton capacity crane installed for lifting heavy cargo in and out of the truck. This was not replaced but will be mounted on a trailer for future use. We started by first emptying the cross bed tool box of all of it’s gear and taking it out of the bed.
The crane was the next item to go. In order to remove the crane, we had to unbolt the base from the special framework that had been welded underneath the bed to support the crane. Believe it or not, when the crane was purchased, the only underbed supports that were supplied were two pieces of eighth inch angle iron. We guess the manufacturer expects the thin sheet metal of the bed to support 1,000lbs from a crane boom extended over the end of the truck.
Once the crane had been taken apart and removed, we were able to then remove the Ford brand bedliner. It was quite a trick getting the liner to collapse enough to allow us to lift it up and over the wheel wells. As you can see in the photo below, the bed itself is in nearly perfect condition not counting the years of dust built up. However, there was not one speck of rust. Now came the hard part. The nuts had become ‘frozen’ on the mouting bolts that secure the bed to the frame. This was a big problem because they were carridge bolts and there was not an easy way to keep them from spinning inside the mounting holes.
The solution was using an air powered cut off tool to cut out two flat areas on the top of each bolt in order to get a grip with a pair of vise-grips. With one person on top getting thier knuckles beat up and the other person below with an impact wrench, they finally gave way. The last item on the list were the fuel tank filler tubes. These were just held on with a small sheet metal type screw on each one. The bed was removed without any problem and the next issue was removing the cab.