It's been a long time since I've started my own thread on here so bare with me until I get back into the swing of things.
About a year ago and a half ago I decided I wanted to build a RCSB 6.4 to have a easy to drive around and a LOT easier to park shop/ toy truck. After searching for a couple months for a base model XT regular cab long bed 6.4 company truck that wasn't completely ragged out in my price range that wasn't 300+ miles away I was still coming up empty handed. So I broadened my search to include 05 and up 6.0's. At this time I was working for a local private shop as their lead Ford diesel tech. turning several 6.0 a week. So i was pretty confident I could keep the 6.0 healthy and on the road. Well it just so happened a couple weeks later a good friend of mine decided he wanted to sell his RCLB 05. The problem was it was 4wd and I was really wanting to lower the truck when i got it done. I still figured what the heck, it can't hurt to go check this thing out and take it for a test drive. So i went and drove it and it had the typical lifted 4X4 steering wonder and Nitto mud grappler roar. ( If you have ever owned a set or been around a truck with a set of these tires you know EXACTLY what i'm talking about lol) I've had nothing but 4X4's with some form of mud tire my entire life and was really looking for something different in this project. So it just wasn't what I was looking for. However when i took the truck back from the test drive he asked me to hang around a minute and look at a truck that he was trading for. We where good friends so of course I stuck around. He even provided a couple cold ones for nourishment while we waited. In no time at all a white 2wd 2005 F350 6.0 with a 9 foot service body came wheeling in the driveway. I looked it over in the driveway and didn't find anything wrong with the initial inspection. So off on a test drive we went. Good tight steering. Good power. Nothing out of the ordinary. I gave the truck my blessing and let them work out the trade. Once it was all said and done with my friend had managed to trade a somewhat ragged out 96 F350 Snatch truck for this 05 straight out. ( still not sure how he managed that) I figured the time to strike was now before he got attached to the service truck and made him an offer. No dice. We where way apart on what I offered and what he thought it was worth. Oh well I'll keep searching.
About two weeks later he calls me up and says if you'll come get this truck for $500 more then your offer its yours. So after a little haggling I couldn't get him to budge but I had looked for so long I hated to see what I though I wanted that was ten minutes from my house slip away for $500. So off to the bank I went. I got it back to the shop I was working at and got it cleaned up and got an idea what I was working with.
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Now in true classic form I had just jumped into a little more then what I realized. I knew from my experience upfitting trucks at my day job that I would have to build bed mounts to put a pick up bed on this frame but no biggie right?
Now it was time to find a short bed :jawdrop: I didn't know that Ford cast these out of gold... People were wanting half of what i paid for the WHOLE truck just for a short bed with no tail gate. So the search was on again. About 2 months into this search I ended up finding a local flatbed/ trailer sales company that was under new management and had two 08 - 10 short beds with tailgates and light and all necessary wiring. That they said had some damage but would be willing to take some offers on. I drove the 30 min. out to their yard to find one rusted out but halfway straight short bed and one rust free but pretty badly damaged on both sides. So I threw out $800 for the 08- 10 tailgate, light, wiring harness and bed. He jumped on it! ( should've offered 500 :doh: )
Next I needed to convert it to a SRW because I think i dually that short would be ridiculous. No problem right? Wrong. I knew I could get away with just new hubs up front and since the rotor and hub where made as one piece that it wouldn't be any problem to make that conversion. I had originally planned to throw some SRW wheels on the back and see if i could live with the width difference between the narrower dually axle with the SRW wheels. What i did not know is that in 2005 Ford duallys went to a 8 on 200 bolt pattern as opposed to the 8 on 170 SRW patternOH: after a bunch of phone calls and a lot of time digging on this forum and a couple other locations on the internet I determined the easiest way to fax this would be just to get an axle out of a 05 SRW truck. now try and find a SRW 10.5 axle with the right spring perch width for a C&C. In this area its easier to find hens teeth. Luckily SRW 10.5 out of a pickup truck aren't too hard to find at all. So I bought one from a local junk yard and cut the factory perches off and moved them to the correct width for what I needed.
So now it was pretty much all on me. I had all the parts it was just time to do the labor. So out came the torch. I had to hack the old service body off where it looked like somebody gave the new guy and bucket of metal scraps and a welder and said " Attach that bed to that truck!" 2 hours and a couple small fires later it was ready to be lifted off.
After some measuring and test fitting of the short bed it was determined that 18 1/2 inches needed to come out in front of the axle and about 8 inches would need to come out from behind the axle since the truck was a cab and chassis and had the rear mounted fuel take between the frame rails. The problem was the rear cross member that held the tank in was too far back. I ended up cutting the front and rear cross members loose from the frame rails and sliding the whole assembly forward as far as I had to for the bed to sit flat on the frame. Got the bed mounts built and the bed bolted down finally. So awesome right? Wrong again. Since the truck had been a C&C and now had pretty much no weight on the rear end it had about 6 inches of rake now. which with the front at the factory 2wd height it was WWAAAAAYYYYY too much. Now came time to decide what the most cost effective way to lower the rear end would be since build funds where running pretty low now.
The decision was made to flip the axle to on top of the now very reduced leaf spring pack. So now remember how I have already moved the factory spring perches? yup they are on the wrong side of the axle now... I decided i was NOT going to spend the time to carefully remove them for a second time. I ordered some after market perches and welded them on the opposite side of the axle at the correct angle for proper pinion angle at the new much lower height. So I get all the drive line back together and set the truck on the ground and i ended up dropping in about 8 inches. Awesome! except now the front is too high. This was easily solved with a phone call to DJM suspension.
The truck is FINALLY completely together and drive able. I drove it a few days and took it to a local body shop where I had them Save the cab lights, fuel door and install a Grant Kustoms all steel roll pan. Stayed with all white to cut some cost on the now WAY over budget project. Ended up taking them about a month or so to get everything done and the truck painted. The day i picked it up from the body shop i drove it straight to the tint shop and had him do a layer of 5% all the way around and 35% on the entire windshield. Sadly the phone I was taking all the pictures of the build with got destroyed while the truck was in the body shop before i got the all the pics on my computer. However this is what it looked like the day I got it back from the tint shop.
This is roughly what it looks like today. I'll post more later just tired of typing for tonight.
About a year ago and a half ago I decided I wanted to build a RCSB 6.4 to have a easy to drive around and a LOT easier to park shop/ toy truck. After searching for a couple months for a base model XT regular cab long bed 6.4 company truck that wasn't completely ragged out in my price range that wasn't 300+ miles away I was still coming up empty handed. So I broadened my search to include 05 and up 6.0's. At this time I was working for a local private shop as their lead Ford diesel tech. turning several 6.0 a week. So i was pretty confident I could keep the 6.0 healthy and on the road. Well it just so happened a couple weeks later a good friend of mine decided he wanted to sell his RCLB 05. The problem was it was 4wd and I was really wanting to lower the truck when i got it done. I still figured what the heck, it can't hurt to go check this thing out and take it for a test drive. So i went and drove it and it had the typical lifted 4X4 steering wonder and Nitto mud grappler roar. ( If you have ever owned a set or been around a truck with a set of these tires you know EXACTLY what i'm talking about lol) I've had nothing but 4X4's with some form of mud tire my entire life and was really looking for something different in this project. So it just wasn't what I was looking for. However when i took the truck back from the test drive he asked me to hang around a minute and look at a truck that he was trading for. We where good friends so of course I stuck around. He even provided a couple cold ones for nourishment while we waited. In no time at all a white 2wd 2005 F350 6.0 with a 9 foot service body came wheeling in the driveway. I looked it over in the driveway and didn't find anything wrong with the initial inspection. So off on a test drive we went. Good tight steering. Good power. Nothing out of the ordinary. I gave the truck my blessing and let them work out the trade. Once it was all said and done with my friend had managed to trade a somewhat ragged out 96 F350 Snatch truck for this 05 straight out. ( still not sure how he managed that) I figured the time to strike was now before he got attached to the service truck and made him an offer. No dice. We where way apart on what I offered and what he thought it was worth. Oh well I'll keep searching.
About two weeks later he calls me up and says if you'll come get this truck for $500 more then your offer its yours. So after a little haggling I couldn't get him to budge but I had looked for so long I hated to see what I though I wanted that was ten minutes from my house slip away for $500. So off to the bank I went. I got it back to the shop I was working at and got it cleaned up and got an idea what I was working with.
Now in true classic form I had just jumped into a little more then what I realized. I knew from my experience upfitting trucks at my day job that I would have to build bed mounts to put a pick up bed on this frame but no biggie right?
Now it was time to find a short bed :jawdrop: I didn't know that Ford cast these out of gold... People were wanting half of what i paid for the WHOLE truck just for a short bed with no tail gate. So the search was on again. About 2 months into this search I ended up finding a local flatbed/ trailer sales company that was under new management and had two 08 - 10 short beds with tailgates and light and all necessary wiring. That they said had some damage but would be willing to take some offers on. I drove the 30 min. out to their yard to find one rusted out but halfway straight short bed and one rust free but pretty badly damaged on both sides. So I threw out $800 for the 08- 10 tailgate, light, wiring harness and bed. He jumped on it! ( should've offered 500 :doh: )
Next I needed to convert it to a SRW because I think i dually that short would be ridiculous. No problem right? Wrong. I knew I could get away with just new hubs up front and since the rotor and hub where made as one piece that it wouldn't be any problem to make that conversion. I had originally planned to throw some SRW wheels on the back and see if i could live with the width difference between the narrower dually axle with the SRW wheels. What i did not know is that in 2005 Ford duallys went to a 8 on 200 bolt pattern as opposed to the 8 on 170 SRW pattern
OH: after a bunch of phone calls and a lot of time digging on this forum and a couple other locations on the internet I determined the easiest way to fax this would be just to get an axle out of a 05 SRW truck. now try and find a SRW 10.5 axle with the right spring perch width for a C&C. In this area its easier to find hens teeth. Luckily SRW 10.5 out of a pickup truck aren't too hard to find at all. So I bought one from a local junk yard and cut the factory perches off and moved them to the correct width for what I needed.So now it was pretty much all on me. I had all the parts it was just time to do the labor. So out came the torch. I had to hack the old service body off where it looked like somebody gave the new guy and bucket of metal scraps and a welder and said " Attach that bed to that truck!" 2 hours and a couple small fires later it was ready to be lifted off.
After some measuring and test fitting of the short bed it was determined that 18 1/2 inches needed to come out in front of the axle and about 8 inches would need to come out from behind the axle since the truck was a cab and chassis and had the rear mounted fuel take between the frame rails. The problem was the rear cross member that held the tank in was too far back. I ended up cutting the front and rear cross members loose from the frame rails and sliding the whole assembly forward as far as I had to for the bed to sit flat on the frame. Got the bed mounts built and the bed bolted down finally. So awesome right? Wrong again. Since the truck had been a C&C and now had pretty much no weight on the rear end it had about 6 inches of rake now. which with the front at the factory 2wd height it was WWAAAAAYYYYY too much. Now came time to decide what the most cost effective way to lower the rear end would be since build funds where running pretty low now.
The decision was made to flip the axle to on top of the now very reduced leaf spring pack. So now remember how I have already moved the factory spring perches? yup they are on the wrong side of the axle now... I decided i was NOT going to spend the time to carefully remove them for a second time. I ordered some after market perches and welded them on the opposite side of the axle at the correct angle for proper pinion angle at the new much lower height. So I get all the drive line back together and set the truck on the ground and i ended up dropping in about 8 inches. Awesome! except now the front is too high. This was easily solved with a phone call to DJM suspension.
The truck is FINALLY completely together and drive able. I drove it a few days and took it to a local body shop where I had them Save the cab lights, fuel door and install a Grant Kustoms all steel roll pan. Stayed with all white to cut some cost on the now WAY over budget project. Ended up taking them about a month or so to get everything done and the truck painted. The day i picked it up from the body shop i drove it straight to the tint shop and had him do a layer of 5% all the way around and 35% on the entire windshield. Sadly the phone I was taking all the pictures of the build with got destroyed while the truck was in the body shop before i got the all the pics on my computer. However this is what it looked like the day I got it back from the tint shop.
This is roughly what it looks like today. I'll post more later just tired of typing for tonight.
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