1965 Chevy Pickup & Hemi Hydro combo

Back to the bed, it's just about ready for it's basswood floor! I started by cleaning up the remaining side, then cut the floor loose, Here's the progress pics, enjoy!

A bit of Dremel work to knock the excess plastic down to a manageable level...


Some serious sanding stick work and this part is now done!


Next up was cutting the bed floor loose from the back edge of the bed...


And the next two shots show the cutting of the bed floor loose from the sides. You can see how wavy the inside of the bed is here pretty easily, the cut lines make it really visible!

Once the floor was cut loose, the smoothing out of the inside of the bed sides started...









All cleaned up and ready for the next step!

finishing off the prep work for the new bed floor. The fun part about the new bed is going to be the four attachment "stubs", I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to get those on the basswood bed floor...



I put the original bed floor back in place and marked where it sits so I can add some angle strip to retain the new basswood floor.



Next, a quick mock-up with two strips of basswood. It's going to be the same thickness as the original plastic bed floor, talk about lucky!

I got the plate for the water intake made up, and set up the goat and flooring insert for the intake pipe. I used a piece of thin brass I got out of an alarm panel to make the plate, and spent a ton of time trying to get the hole just right for the pipe to fit properly. Here's the pics, enjoy!

It took two tries to get the hole in the brass just right, this was fun!





The plate in it's proposed spot on the hull....



I marked around the plate, and marked the hole so I could drill the hull for the intake pipe...



The hardest part was getting the angle of the hole right so the intake pipe would sit the way I wanted once it gets glued in place. This took about as long as getting the hole right in the brass sheet!

Here's the angle I wanted on the intake pipe, it wasn't easy, but I pulled it off!



I put the intake tube in place and marked it where it came out of the hull, it'll get cut off in the next post!



A quick mock-up of the plate, I think this is gonna work!