'57 Stepside road-race build

[OneOffStroker]

Originally Posted by hotrodelrod

Nice work and thank you for your service! What are you using for an oven? Did you build one?

Rick

I did build my own oven. It has three elements from regular house ovens that I got cheap from Craigslist. It has a PID controller for heat control and also has a fan in it so it is a true convection oven. Internal dimensions are 6'H x 4'W x 3'D
I built it to ensure that I can powder coat motorcycle frames, because I build more bikes than cars.

For the gun, I use a Hyper Smooth 2 that I got from Columbia Coatings and have modded a little bit for even better performance.

[OneOffStroker]

So I have a little bit of progress to report. I needed to tub my bed a little bit because the ZR1 wheels are pretty wide, and I will probably go even wider in the future. I had though about getting tubs from a fleetside and narrowing them, because I only want about 4" of tub because I want to have as much bed space as possible for when I take the race bike(s) to the track. BUT, this would be too costly for my tastes, because the tubs are about $100 each, and I"m only going to use about 40% of them, and I just couldn't justify that.

So...I picked this up for $50. It is very straight, no rust, and should fit the build after some light mods. (from a '89 Silverado)


Need to drill the spot welds to remove the angle stop at the bottom. It will not be used.


I mocked the bedside up to the frame with it bottomed out and traced around the tire to get the profile to cut out.


Cut with jigsaw


The tires/wheels didn't intrude much, but just enough to justify the small tubs


Cut 3.5" off each side to get the tubs to 4 inches


Sectioned 7" from the middle to get total width to 50 inches.


Had to drill more spot welds to remove the middle and rear cross braces.


Will need to section about 1-1.5" from the end to get it tucked in nicely.


And finally a teaser shot of half of it mocked up.


There is still a lot of work to do. I need to make new mounts for the new bed's mounting holes on the cross braces, as well as make flanges to secure the tubs and floor to the the bedsides. I'll take pics to document when I get there.

[Kim57]

That should work out real nice.
Kim

[t-tung]

Love it. That's exactly what I'm going to do with mine. Only difference is I'm going to cut the tubs out and move them in instead of taking material out of the middle. Nice work.

[ChuckDriver]

Nicely done!

[OneOffStroker]

Thanks for the comments everyone!

My time is extremely short before I deploy, so over the weekend I assembled all the parts that were laying all over my back yard and garage. This is the result:



This may be one of my last posts for a while, but I'm going to come back with a full head of steam and get this old girl on the road by the end of 2015!!

[t-tung]

Nice! Where are you deploying to? My brother just deployed to Kuwait but may be forward deploying to Iraq.

[ChuckDriver]

Wow! Looks awesome!!

[oldman3]

That looks sweet...Jim

[RockinKees]

That looks very nice!!
And very low!

[Kim57]

Looks great.
Kim

[watahyahknow]

could use some old style faded racing decals and numbers