King, you may be correct in your observation. The wood being Southern Yellow Pine would be quite porous and would have soaked up the enamel even with a heavy application of paint. In a case like that the enamel would remain glossy on the strips and the wood would appear to be flat. I doubt if they applied any more then one quick heavy coat of enamel to the bed wood. At first glance the bottom of my floor doesn’t appear to have any paint on it. I will know more when I get to the disassembly or the bed.
Since I haven’t had my bed apart yet I’m not sure what the autopsy will show. But you can be assured that I’ll report what I find since it has the original box, bed wood and strips still and other than the grain on the top side being blistered up it’s still in good to very good condition.
However, all that being said, when I look at the floor of the bed it could not have been pre-assembled and installed on the truck first. They would not have been able to drop the box in place over the pre-mounted floor because of the flanges at the bottom of the box sides and the rear sill. The pre-assembled floor could not be dropped in from the top of the box because of the angles that are spot welded to the box sides. But it does look like the floor as a painted assembly could have been slid in from the front of the completed box, then bolted to the box and finally the whole unit dropped onto the frame.
All of this is archeological in nature since we’ve never been able to find anyone that actually worked in the GM truck assembly plants in the early 50’s. Also, other than a handful of pictures floating around, there appears to be no other documentation of how the trucks were assembled. So all we can do is record as many observations as we can while dismantling the trucks and make a logical guess as to the sequence of production. Even though I have no intention of ever building a show quality truck myself, as some of you may have noticed, this is one of the phases of restoration that really holds my interest in these AD trucks.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
