Fixing up an older pickup truck, part 2

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Hello, and welcome to my page!

This is part 2 of the series that I'm writing about my pickup truck project. You can read part one at this link.
https://steemit.com/car-repair/@amberyooper/fixing-up-an-older-pickup-truck-part-1

In part one, I talked about replacing the rear shocks on my pickup truck and finding more rust scale than I expected on the frame. Because I wanted to clean up and paint the frame, I decided that the best way to do that would be to pull the box off the truck. After I got the rear shocks installed, I found the bolts holding on the back bumper and the box and cleaned the threads as best I could with my wire brush, and then sprayed them with penetrating oil. Since I wanted to give the penetrating oil some time to work, I didn't do anything else on the truck that day.

The next time I worked on the truck, a couple of days later, the first thing I did was to remove the tailgate from the box, and then remove the bumper from the frame. The bumper was held on by 4 very stubborn bolts. I ended up getting one loose, breaking one off, and cutting the the other 2 bolts off where they stuck out of the nut with the angle grinder and a cutoff wheel. After that, those 2 nuts came loose and I was able to get the bumper off the frame.
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From there, I had to remove the six bolts that hold the box onto the frame. Those bolts have a big head that's easy to get to in the bed of the box, and requires a T-55 torx tip socket to remove. I was able to get them all loose with the help of a piece of pipe on my 3/8ths drive breaker bar. I would have used a 1/2 inch drive breaker bar, but the torx socket is a 3/8ths drive. I also managed to not break the breaker bar in the process. I also unplugged the tail light harness between the main harness and the box.

After pulling the bolts out, it was just a matter of getting the box off the frame. We couldn't just pick the box up and carry it off the frame, so we worked it off the frame with the help of the stump of the tree that had been recently removed from the back yard.
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There were a few hangups in the process of getting the box off, but we finally managed to get it off the frame. I had to find something to set the other end of the box on once I finally got the truck out from under the box. I ended up using the stand for a rabbit cage that I used to have.
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In this picture, you can see the rust damage to the rear frame crossmember. I'll have to replace this piece, but I'll probably just make one from a piece of channel iron. Since this piece is riveted onto the frame, I'll have to cut the rivets to get it off.
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There's a lot of rust scale on some parts of the frame, but there's no rust holes that I could find. In order to clean up the frame properly, I'm going to take a lot of the parts off the frame. All four of the spring shackles are replacement parts, I think, and since they're bolted on, they should come off reasonable well. There's a few other parts that I also want to take off the frame so that I can get to those areas easier for clean up and painting. I'll be starting on the disassembly and clean up this week while the weather is still reasonably warm. I need to get the frame painted before it gets too cold to paint. I'll continue this process in the next post in this series.

That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!

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3 comments
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Hello!

This post has been manually curated, resteemed
and gifted with some virtually delicious cake
from the @helpiecake curation team!

Much love to you from all of us at @helpie!
Keep up the great work!


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Manually curated by @torico.


@helpie is a Community Witness.
For more information about our project,
please visit this month’s UPDATE post.

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Hi, @amberyooper!

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