Capture Colorado 01 TRD Taco - GOAE build

That sounds about right, it's probably about the same distance, just higher speed limits through most of UT over there.

I get to drive over tons of passes and pretty canyons though

 

yeah ill have to look at is sage brush and scrub oak.. haha

 

Today was the first of several in the process of building out the bed. Despite a late start, I made reasonable progress. Took my time and discussed order of operations and fine-tuned the design with my dad, realized I had plenty of space to build the bed wider than planned, and got height measurements.

Started out with four 8' pieces of 1.5"x1.5"x.125 tube, and 4 soft universal body mount bushings.


Each of the bed mounting points are all a dumb. I'm using the 4 primary mounting locations, and there's 4 different sized...and shaped holes. We came up with a way to enlarge them systematically with a hole saw, by measuring the width that we needed in order to center the bushings on the mounts, then we drilled into a piece of scrap mahogany and clamped that to the mounts, and used that as a guide, keeping the hole saw in position. Now there's 4 symmetrical holes, perfectly sized for the bushings.


I began by drilling the frontmost holes in the pieces of steel that run parallel to the chassis. I've got about 1-1/4" of space between the cab and the front of the flatbed, less depending on where you measure from. Once those two holes were drilled and the pieces of steel were cut to length, I bolted them up to the truck.


Then the cross pieces were cut, four pieces at 43.25" long. I used a couple of small pieces of scrap 1/8" flat bar, clamped one on either side of the tube (top & bottom) to keep the cross pieces properly aligned vertically; squared everything up with a framing square and clamped it all down. Once it checked out, I double checked, then I did it again to be sure. Finally, tacked got started tacking things into place.


Pulled it off and got to work burning everything in and drilled the holes for the rear frame mounts.


Turns out the rear holes were off by a small factor... about 3/8", not sure how that happened, the measurement was good (I checked like 6 times...). So the dremel got a workout ovalizing the holes. Once they were properly ovalized, I got it back on the truck, bolted down and squared up with the cab, and made sure I had clearanced the bolt holes enough to pass for government work.


Once that was done, I pulled it back off and capped the tubes, I have 4 short beads to run tomorrow, then it's time to attack the mill scale with a fervor and slap some paint down on everything.

I'm happy with the bushing kit I found on Amazon, it's inexpensive and the durometer is perfect for this application, soft enough that I'm confident it'll give enough to prevent the box from getting overly stressed, but not so soft that it'll be squirmy. I definitely recommend them for anything of similar application.

Tomorrow morning it's off to Home Depot I go for materials, then my dad and I will be holed up in his wood shop getting everything cut and glued up. Then while the glue is curing and there's not much to be done on that end, I'll get to work on the rest of the steel, and hopefully get it painted so it can be curing overnight, then I expect to be able to have the bed mounted, and begin painting on Monday, hopefully wiring and such that day as well. Not sure if it'll be ready to drive by the end of Monday, that would be cool, but unlikely I think. I still need to get hardware...hinges, latches, etc. for that to happen, and I don't yet have a dialed parts list in order for that to be a thing. I could probably see getting the shell painted and on, but mostly unusable as it wouldn't have a tailgate or lid.

I also haven't figured out what material I need for fenders, but I have a plan for how to make those happen.

No matter what - progress! I think I'm gonna paint it with that gallon of CARC tan as a test color to see what color I want to use, because ultimately I'll likely end up bedlining the whole truck, and want to only do that once....

 

Will be closely watching what you come up with. Should be awesome when you finish up!

 

awesome start man!!

 

Thanks fellas I'm pumped for seeing this materialize, and having a fully optimized expedition bed! Also looking forward to having some weight out back, between the stiff expo springs and stiffly valved shocks, no bumper and an empty bed makes for a HARSH ride. Yesterday when we got the bed off, I went to the car wash to give it a good power down, and the slow 3-block crawl through alleys (no tail lights, decided to play it safe) was bone-jarring. As it is I had to lower my tire pressure to 16.5psi so I wouldn't spin out on every slightly wet corner. On a side note, I made a lot of people laugh at the car wash when I drove my awkward looking, heavily modded, but half-truck over a small wall from the alley into the car wash.

One thing that's in the back of my mind is what to do with back of the sliders. When you look at the sliders on the truck Adventure Trailers put the TacoChaser on, the sliders end at the back of the cab. While I don't necessarily want the slider to end AT the back of the cab, not sure how to modify that. I don't really have many tools for tube work. My thoughts are to cut the curved part out, cut the tube fairly even with the rearmost standoff, then gently remove the curved bit and reuse it. That would be the cleanest, but challenging to weld the tube into place... wish I'd have thought about this while the cab was off the frame.

Of course, I could just have the tube come to an end in both spots and not reconnect the two...

 

If you need some custom tube bending done, you might hit up Josh at RCI. He's got a pretty sweet CNC tube bender.

 

I think in the interest of budget, I'm gonna stick to the rule of KISS... and just cut and cap the ends. After taking some measurements today, there's one possibility of reusing the bent part of tube, but it'll be an interesting series of cuts and a lot of intricate cutting and grinding with a dremel... which may be worth exploring as an option. Otherwise Ballistic's round tube ends are cheap, so I can grab 4 of them and cleanly cap everything.

 

+1

 

Yep, the capping method is what I'm gonna do.

Yesterday we got the box all glued up, that was an interesting ordeal... We have spring clamps for small miters, like on trim and cap moulding on kitchen cabinets, but they're not really designed to apply the pressure we were looking for along a 72" long miter that's not 90*... So that was interesting. Every single connection and joint of the box is held together with Titebond waterproof glue, on top of that, we used biscuits for alignment and additional strength, about every 6" or so along each joint. You can see here how the spring clamps were implemented for the weird application, with a bunch of other clamps to hold things together in all sorts of directions.

One other thing, is this bed is currently using: Birch, Mahogany, Alder, Pine, and probably some other woods I'm not aware of in the plywood. The end caps on the tailgate end are Mahogany, which is a really dense, really strong African hardwood, so once coated with bedliner, it'll hold up to stupid amounts of abuse. It was also the hardest wood we had scraps of...



On a final note, I've decided to just cut and cap the sliders like I had mentioned earlier, it'll be the simplest...and I don't feel like dealing with trying to patch the tube back together. I think it'll look fine as well, and should roll off obstacles fine.

Today's the last day off, and the bed isn't ready for paint yet, not even close... so I'm going to wrap up and clean up the garage and wood shop before heading home. I still need to formulate a plan on how to run power into the box, I'm thinking about putting together a small junction box that'll mount to the bottom of the bed, and I'll steal the female connectors from the turn signals, that way if I, or anyone else go back to a standard bed, the connections will still be there. That should keep things pretty simple, I'll only need...
Stock in for:
- R. turn / stop
- L turn / stop
- tail
- ground

Power for:
- Reverse
- L Alley
- R Alley

So signal in from 4 stock sources, signal in from 2 of my own sources, then three power in for aux stuff. I need to draw up a map/diagram to get a handle on how I want to make the connections happen.

 

That's looking good!

 

dang man, should be sweet, i wish u were closer, we have a crap ton of hard maple scraps the would have been nice for that, looks good none the less.

 

Looks great!

 

Just out of curiosity, why did you use wood?

It looks good and I really like the idea that you're doing.

 

With the equipment I have access to, it's easier to make everything perfect and accurate as opposed to metal. I don't have access to, nor do I have money to hire a shop to bend sheetmetal with a break. Mostly, it's cheaper to go this route - sheet metal isn't cheap, and it sucks to weld. This route, it'll be plenty strong, and far more rigid than other options, the one or two notable weak points of this design can be accounted for with small, relatively lightweight additions to the setup to help reinforce the tail-end of the box when loaded with bikes/gear on top.

The downfalls with this design is on the lower mitered joint, the further from the cab side, the more susceptible it will be to flexing out/down, that would be the case with steel as well (not having a solid piece on the back)... I'll combat that by building a smallish gusset that will bolt to the box in one or two locations, thus adding rigidity. The benefit of using plywood, is that since it's a more rigid material than sheet metal of reasonable and applicable thicknesses, is that it allows me the opportunity to add smaller gussets without having to overbuild them to compensate for thing material. In addition, the lid, once clamped down, will tie everything together as one effective unit, assisting in all of that.

The final downfall, and probably most significant, is that the fact that it's wood, layered, and not innately waterproof. I decided that rather than using expensive ($80+/sheet) MDO, I'd use cheaper Home Depot plywood ($35/sheet) and coat it in bedliner.

Basically, from my dad's perspective, this is just a large cabinet... he's been a carpenter for decades, so the idea to build it as a cabinet was a pretty easy conclusion to come to.

One idea I had to make the structure a little stouter, and easier to get on top of for loading and unloading gear (bikes... with my bad shoulder), is to make a bolt-on, low profile folding ladder, that'd be pretty minor, and would mean I don't need to carry a step stool

....it'll also allow access into a.... certain... er, project that'll be expanded upon at a later date.

 

I also came up with a plan for fenders, and turning the whole platform into more than just a base for the box, but a proper flatbed, so if I need to I can pull the box and have the whole thing be sheeted and ready to haul big stuff. Check it out... The areas outside the box will be skinned fully, the area the box rests on probably wouldn't be in interest of money, but I do have some plywood scraps, which I can mount inset into the frame, so their surface is flush with the steel, and coat it with something like boat paint or bedliner, not really sure. If I could afford it, I'd inset HDPE in there, that way any hauling on that surface wouldn't really damage it all that much.



Then, for wiring.... Forgive the shitty handwriting, but after lots of brainstorming this morning I finally came up with what I think is a viable and versatile option for how to wire this thing up. Basically since I want to be able to have the bed usable as a flatbed, and as the box, but I want to use similar tail lights as Adventure Trailers did on the TacoChaser, I need to have the box wired up and capable of being disconnected without being a pain, but also need to be able to hook up some sort of other light for the infrequent use of the flatbed... I can do this, but then have some sort of trailer lights that could hang out on the platform when hauling big stuff.



Of course, I could also add some 6" oval STT lights into the bumper when it's built, but also have the lights on the trailer for assurance.

 

right on, I would have never thought to build it out of wood.

 

Are any of you looking for, or do you know anyone who might in the market for a softopper or bedrug? I need to get these things sold so I can fund the rest of the flatbed... Kind of killed the funds already and still have a bit to go.

Also, if anyone wants to buy a truck bed for cheap, let me know.

 

Been making more progress, picked up some more material to continue work on the flatbed and begin work on the bumper. I went to get some more done today, then found out some of the weatherpack connectors I need to hook the new tail lights up won't be here for another 2 weeks or more, so I kind of lost a little motivation to get this wrapped up by the end of day tomorrow since I won't be able to legally drive anywhere with the flatbed till the wiring bits show up.

Oh well. Patience.

Got materials, drew out a profile view of the bumper in preparation for cutting up the components.


Got some work done on the fenders.




Bumper started


Quickly starting to look like a bumper already.


The hinge kit I'm using isn't the same as I did on the other TacoAss bumpers I've made so far, although I had planned on doing a longer spindle, I had this kit from a failed project I played around with a while back. It was a dual sheer face mount bracket with a 1" grade 8 bolt. I decided to drill a 1" hole in the plate, and will add a few gussets below the bolt, as well as fab up a dual sheer bracket that'll bolt to the side. I'm pretty sure it'll be stout enough. I'm hoping it will be, for sure...

 

Sweet. What welder do u have