[Cautrell05]

I have been looking for ideas for the bed floor for a while. I knew that it was going to be in patina for quite a while. Before I started at a restoration shop I knew that it was a lot of work and expense to go through and do all the paint and body work on this truck. But after being here for a year now and seeing the process up close I never realized how much I did not know. It will be an absolute buttload of work when this thing transitions from patina to shiny. So for the time being it's going to stay in patina which is fine because I've had a lot of people compliment me on the look and personally I like it. The different layers of paint and the old body shop lettering really set it off.
Because of that, to me, a brand new refinished bed floor in a full patina truck would just look really out of place and odd. I didn't want to put just rusty sheet metal in there and go for the rat rod look because I'm not interested in the rat rod look. No offense to the guys that have it and love it, it's just not for me. Then I decided to use old barn wood with the existing original well-weathered bed strips. On the back of my property there is an old corn crib that has probably been standing since about the time that truck was new and in the last 20 years has been attempting to fall over on itself but can't quite do that. The color and the weathering on the wood look like it be about ideal. When it actually came time to try and find enough straight sections of wood to use bed floor the South side that was well weathered only had five or six fairly good strips in it but they were narrower than a standard bed strip. The north side of the building still had some of the original red paint that I to be honest never realized was on there in the first place. I took what I had for good boards and I laid them out in my garage floor and after looking at it for a few minutes I came up with an idea. The combination of faded red boards and faded white ish boards looked like a really good foundation for a faded flag. Before I started just throwing boards in and painting stars I did a little bit of research to in planning. An official flag has 13 stripes, a 47 bed has nine boards. If I go 13 boards with the original bed strips it almost ends up with as much bed strip as there is wood. So I compromised and went with 11 boards but rather than just make an improper flag, I went online and found out there's actually flag calculators that you punch in any one of the dimensions and it'll give you every single one of the other dimensions as far as star size and spacing and stripes spacing and whatnot.