1947 ford ranger...

Yeah, I should hope not at £100 a sheet.

We used to have it on the trailers at work but it was treacherous to walk on in the wet, our MT had to smother it in slip resistant paint which kind of defeated the object of having a nice looking finish to the deck.

Colin

I’ve had a fair bit of experience with it, also mostly on trailers, and not found it too bad at all. Granted it’s not a totally not slip surface, but it keeps away the slime you get on normal plain wood which makes a big difference.

So, that £100 sheet of ply. First I chucked it on the trestles (upside down of course) and cut it down to size. That was the easier bit, but it is difficult to mark with anything that shows up. Silver streak welders pencil was what I used in the end.
The bed is 7’ long exactly, and is 46” wide at the frame but the swages add 3/8” either side as it’s widest point, so it was cut to that and then I’ll notch out the corners where the swages aren’t afterwards.


I just used a hand held evolution panel saw that I use for general building work, as I heard phenolic is hard on ‘normal’ blades. It cut it with no issues and the blade wasnt exactly new. I used a guide clamped on for cutting the foot wide bit off the end, then used the edge fence for ripping the narrow bit off the edge.


The high-stress job is mashing the router through it multiple times to do the big (34mm wide X 12mm deep) grooves for the tracking. After much measuring and marking I decided to have it at about 9” in from the edge to the centre of the tracking, as this looked about best and it’ll mean they act as slide rails as well as tie downs. A strip of steel was clamped down offset by half the router base measurement to act as a guide.

The router I used was only a trend t5, so quite a small machine really.

It’s a messy job, huge amounts of dust and many passes so as not to over face the router. I was doing each cut 3x times to get the depth, and I only had a 16mm bit so it’s two cuts wide with a little tidying pass down the middle to remove the last couple of mil after.


The tracking is a snug fit and just drops in with a slight tap of the rubber hammer.


Turn the whole thing round, make a lot more mess-


And then you have two.


I like the way it sort of echoes a stock earlier style bed with the wood planks joined by metal rub strips. By this point in time ford beds actually had a steel skin over wooden planks.

Here how the tracking sits in relation to the surface. Proud enough stuff will side on it, low profile enough that it’s not hindering you moving stuff about.


After talking with people who use it commercially, It’ll get the cut edges painted with epoxy resin and the tracking sikaflexed/tigersealed into the grooves to seal it.

I’m fairly relieved that bit iOS over, I was envisioning all manner of ways of it going wrong and destroying my expensive materials.
Just the corner notches to do and I’m ready to test fit!

Are you bolting it to the ply?

Tee nuts?

A significant development has occurred.

After months, nay years of looking, these have just fallen into my lap.




They are off a 48-52 f2 truck, so are very long. Which is good as it means I need to shorten rather than lengthen. And they’re exactly the right shape for my rear fenders and bed so will just bolt straight up at the back, it’ll be the front end I need to reshape.

Truck running boards are so hard to get, they never seem to come up for sale so I jumped on these like a fat kid on cake. The catch? They were in Manchester and I was in Colchester.

Luckily I was visiting my northern estate in Yorkshire to do some works, and more conveniently they were on the east side of mank, so a quick blast over woodhead one very foggy night and I was in soon in gorton relieving a chap of them.

And here they are once I got back to Yorkshire. Mega happy with those, mostly because the patina is about right to match the rest of the truck, whereas if I made new ones they would look new and stand out.

Thats a doll's chair for scale. Right?

😄
Not quite!
The corner where the ceiling/wall meet in the top left of the pic is at 8’ though, making them over 7 feet long. Definitely caused a bit of an ‘oh sh1t’ moment when I got to Manchester and saw how long they were!
They just went in a s-max with the front seat all the way forward and the backrest wound up so it was touching the dash.

It’s where the aforementioned strengthening ribs rot through.

“They all do that sir” 😂