Maybe its just perspective, but, that looks REALLY short..... How long is the bed on that??

 

It has the 8 ft bed. I measured it before taking it off just to be sure.

EDIT: I just looked at my notes again and it looks like I wrote down 80 inches, not 8 ft. I really need to type this stuff into my phone instead of scribbling it down with my chicken scratch writing.. That could have been bad.

 

IIRC all extended cabs are 6.5 feet advertised bed length....so yes, 80 inches.

 

Yeah, I noticed something was off when I was at the junkyard measuring the extended cab beds and they were all 6'8 inches. In my defense I have a condition similar to Parkinson's so my handwriting is usually difficult to read even for me.

Yesterday I torqued up all the u-bolts, got the rear sway bar installed and torqued down, hooked up all the brake lines and bled the system. I managed to get the ABS light to go out, but the brakes still feel a bit spongy. No leaks, but there is a horrible squeak from the rear when I let off the brakes. I will try to lube up the contact areas where the shoes contact the backing plate and see if that fixes it.

With the brakes functioning, I fired it up and shifted through the gears. It shifted fine forward and back, but it made a clicking noise when I shifted into neutral.. It sounded like a loose bolt on the flexplate, but I'm not 100% on that. I will need to pull the inspection cover and check it out.

 

Spongy is sadly close to normal for these trucks. Concur that neutral ticking is flexplate/converter bolt, won't tick under load since the assembly is loaded to one direction or the other.

A trick that I learned and like to suggest, bring the wheelspeed up to 30-40 MPH with the rear on jackstands, and nail the brakes. That *should* cycle the ABS solenoids to help knock the air out of those pockets.

 

Also, make sure your rears are adjusted up properly. That is what controls pedal height.

 

Thanks Magnet, will definitely give that a shot. HeyYou, I ended up tackling that on Sunday. Attached the parking brake cables and adjusted the star wheels on both rears. The pedal height does seem better now, but whoever designed those parking brake cables needs to be beat with an axle shaft. It took me way longer than I would like to admit to get it all hooked up and functioning. I still need to adjust the passenger side cable, the parking brakes only stop the driver's side wheel. I ran out of patience and daylight.

On Saturday, I rented a trailer and headed to the local u-pull which was having a 50% off everything sale! Picked up this beauty for only $127. It has a few minor dings in it and of course I will need to re-spray it white, but All things considered, I think I got a steal.

 

Nice find. Too cold here to go wandering the yards this time of year.

 

Last week I started prepping the new bed for paint, I picked up some Duplicolor perfect match rattle can paint and some Spraymax 2K clear to paint the front of the bed before installing it. I sanded it down with 600 grit, then went over it with a gray Scotch Brite pad. After that I did several wipe downs with a homemade mixture of 50-50 rubbing alcohol and acetone as a wax and grease remover. Then I taped around the edge with painter's tape. I rolled the edge up so that I wouldn't get any hard lines of paint that I would need to sand down later.

I shot 3 coats of the Duplicolor, focusing on the outside edges where you can actually see it. I didn't worry too much about getting full coverage in the middle area.
Then I waited for about 45 minutes and shot 3 coats of the clear over the top. It looked really orange peely at first but flowed out a bit as it cured.

I was entertaining the idea of just shooting the bed sides with these cans, it would cost me about $150 to do it this way, but I think I am going to invest in a larger compressor and spray the whole truck in a blue hued pearl white. For now, though, my focus was on getting the bed mounted...

 

So after the paint dried, I was excited to get the bed bolted on and reassembled. We lifted it into place and I lined it up square with the cab and started installing bolts.

I could only get 6 bolts to thread in with the bed sitting squared up to the cab. The frame is bent. I had to pull the bed off and try to measure and see if it was out of square or just the mounts were bent.

So I got the bed back off, and started measuring. I measured from the cab to the end of the frame, corner to corner, width, and hole to hole. I marked a centerline up the middle and measured from those to the holes.. Every measurement came out square except from the center line to these holes:



The hole behind the passenger side cab is oversized, so even though it lines up and a bolt will fit, it is out of alignment.