The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Making a Stovebolt Bed lifting the bed on a half ton AD

I want to lift my bed enough to slip the rubber pads onto the mounting blocks. The truck doesn't have them. I plan to undo the 6 long bolts, the rear fender bracket and the bolt which attaches the skirt to the fender as well as bolts from the fenders to the running boards. The bed will sit 1/4" higher (pad thickness) but am wondering if the pads will compress from the weight of the bed so these holes will line up. I am not concerned about the long mounting bolts. Any comments/suggestions will be appreciated.

OK. I did a simple test to see how much the pads compress under load. I placed two pads between two ground steel plates and measured the gap between the plates at .240". This is basically the pad thickness without a load on them. Then I started squeezing the plates together and measured the gap at various loads. Here is what I found. At 100# load, the gap had not changed appreciably. At 500# load, the gap was .235", a compression of .005" which is the thickness of two layers of newspaper. At 1000# load, the gap was .223", a compression of .017. At 1500# load, the gap was .205", a compression of .035".

Remember there are two pads in this test, so the load per pad is 1/2 of the total load. It seems unlikely that a typical truck would see 1000# per cross sill on a regular basis. Even a compression of .017" is probably absorbed readily by the structure of the bed.

Over time, the pads will likely take some kind of permanent set and change thickness just from having a constant load on them. I have no data on that. I just did this test to help you get an idea of the stiffness of the pads and their response to the load applied.

Also, we recommend you place the pads between the wood block and the frame, to avoid possible distortion of the bracket on the cross sill.

Let me know if you have questions

Mar-Ktech

Thank you. Obviously I appreciate the effort you made for this question. Interesting figures. No there will not be 1000# of weight per cross sill nor in the complete bed. The heaviest item I ever carried was a cast iron PowerGlide trans.
Thank you!