69 homemade short bed

[rjs53]

Going from LWB to SWB but to cheap to get the new bed sides, so shortening the old long bed. I decided to try two of the popular methods as far as the front goes. I drilled all the spot welds out of the front brace and homered the edges. This is very time consuming and measuring from multiple places is a must. In my case the bed has some pretty bad damage which made it hard to find a spot to measure from that I could use on the other panel and have both turn out the same length, or at least proportionate. The other side I simply cut sections out and welded back together. This is not as easy as I thought. When trying to line everything up the bed sides sag from the inner brace being cut. Its taken me about 4 days to get to the point I'm at. Worst case is they turnout looking like junk and I buy the bed sides or I found another bed in good shape for $450 and I cut that one. The first picture is the one I tried to make look like factory with the end crimped over. It looks crooked but just the way I took the pic. The 2nd is the other method of cut a section out and weld back. As you can see by the bottom picture I'm going to have to get a patch panel and do more work, about a 1/2" of filler was covering up damage.