How to Raise your Bed Floor in your Classic Truck

Out here, I'm known as a guy that's good at wood. I'm gonna teach you how to get it up. All right, hey guys, Jason with Fat Fender Garage, and we are here today, we're cracking a few jokes, but we're gonna take it a little more seriously now. But we wanna introduce and kinda talk to you about a product so a lot of times when we're doing a bed floor, a lot of customers, especially if you have a bag truck and you got a lot of stuff underneath it, they wanna have like the floor open up, kinda open sesame, this little esophagus down in there. And so when you wanna learn how to get your wood bed up, there's a process to make that happen. They want me to say how to get your wood up, but anyways. So how to get your wood bed floor up, and we're gonna show you how to do that. Hit it, Charlie. All right, so one of the tricks we've had with this is actually over the years, we've done a few different scenarios. And that was how to actually get this to work smoothly, efficiently, not a lot of weight on your actuators. Matter of fact, these are only six inch actuators that we're using. And so real compact, and yet at the same time, you can see that it's pushing it up quite a ways. So the struggle you have is the further back that you go with your actuator and pivot point, the more weight is going to be cantilevering out that you're gonna have to actually support. And so then the question becomes is how much weight can an actuator hold? And so you can spend a lot of money on really, really expensive actuators. They're not cheap to begin with. But trying to find that harmony and balance with the process of building a cool truck and have it work. We also like to use Dakota Digital. They have a dual actuator linear controller that actually will control both of them the same and in sync. And then we'll have three different positions that you can have it stop at. So one could be down, and then two may be different up positions. So it makes it a little bit easier to fuel up your gas tank when you got all this stuff there. You don't have to have all that stuff cut through your bed to access it. But what we've done though is as we were thinking of a way to put these together, I started doing a little research on how can we take some weight off the actuator. And so what we decided to do is we came up with this variation. It works for us. You guys might have another variation that works for you. But this is what we decided to do. And that is what we took is created like a bell crank. And that the actuator pushes down. It kind of has an asymmetrical pivot point. And so as it's kind of that lopsided pivot point, we then can put an arm on it that can help push it up. So you can kind of take a look right here. We've got an arm here that we seracoded black. Down here, we've got this bell crank. So it's kind of an A shape, kind of a asymmetrical A shaped. And we've got two pivot points, the actuator pivot point here, and then where it mounts onto the bed. And so it goes up and down. If I use just a regular actuator, it's actually slower going up and down. But because of the rotation of the bell crank, it actually moves it a little bit faster. So it can handle a lot more weight. And so we have a couple of different arms that we sell. It just depends on where you have to fit that in your bed. If you need a little bit longer arm or shorter arm, we have a couple of variations. But let's show you what it looks like. Charlie, come over here and he's gonna help us discuss this a little bit. Charlie's the professional here. He's installed this, what, four or five times. And we'll kind of just give a little bit of a brief explanation. So this is a kit that you can purchase. It all comes together. You're gonna get two actuators. You'll choose which length of arm you'll want. You're gonna get the part that mounts to the bed, the little bell crank. That's spacious, doesn't it? Yeah. And then we've got some parts that you're gonna weld on to the actual metal to help. So Charlie, give us a little explanation and your thought process. So when you're starting to set this up, obviously we redid some instructions so that way they're a lot more helpful to install. What you're saying is we made instructions. Yeah. Okay. Yes, yeah. So anyways, these are the parts that you'll weld up into your bed. So that way you can bolt everything on in place to get your first piece put in there. As you're doing that, you're also gonna wanna figure out the location of your actuator in conjunction with this. So as you're putting it all together, well, looking over there is a little easier, but. What do you got going on here, Charlie? Hold on. All right. So, all right, so we're gonna help Charlie. So down here is what we're talking about, right, Charlie? And then we're talking about this piece. Yep, you're right up here. Going right here, right? And so this pivot point is pushing with the actuator like this, right? So in the kit, you'll have hardware, obviously, to go with all this. Everything runs on bearings. So that way it's a smooth transition up and down. And what you'll find is as you put this together, welding these beds in place, they will move a little bit. So you'll have different bushings that will come in the kit and you'll have to trim those. You might have one side that's maybe a quarter inch wider than the other side to bolt all this together to get it run through. Like bushings in here? Yeah, bushings in here and in here, because you may need to move this back and forth to get everything to run true. The other cool thing about this is the bed going up and down can come crooked, come up crooked, go down crooked, and you can adjust it here. And also you'll have little heim joints in there. So left hand and right hand threads, so you don't have to take it apart each time. You can just screw this up and down and get your bed to move up and down. So getting that adjusted. Yep, your adjustability. You have a lot of ways to adjust it. When I put them together, I put everything together completely closed before I have any weight on it. I run it up and down a couple of times. That way I can reach in there and adjust these as I set it down. If one side's tipped up more than the other side, I can close it exactly how I want. And when you're done, it shuts perfectly. So what happens is as you're welding your frames up and building your doors and everything, you hope that it's gonna lay perfectly in there. But oftentimes when you're welding things together, there's enough heat that it might be slightly distorted a little bit. So as you're dialing all that in, this gives you the adjustment you need to kinda make sure that everything's pulling down equally and evenly at the same time. Yeah, and your bars that run down, they'll walk a little bit on you too. That's why the little bushings that come in the kit, you just trim them to fit how you need them to. And you wanna make sure that once all that's together, that your lock nuts that come in the kit have plenty of bolt coming through them so that way nothing can come loose. So this is a Dakota Digital dual linear actuator controller. And this will just mount in the dash. And on these trucks, we'll just mount it actually in the gauge bezel right in there. So if you gotta get gas, you put it in park, you'll hit one of the buttons, it raises it up like just two feet, just enough to get your hose in there and fill it up. And when you get back in the truck, you hit the other button and it closes it. And so it doesn't overclose it and keep trying to pull it down. You can actually set it to stop it right where it needs to be. Obviously, we put like a little rubber bumpers and different things in few areas just so that when it hits, it hits a little padded bumper and you can do that as well. You're gonna get all the wiring harness, plugins and everything. These go to the actuators and it's really quite simple. You've got a little brain right here that connects it. This is the usual Dakota Digital module. So pretty nice kit, very simple. We've put a lot of time into this designing it. These are all custom aluminum machine parts. And again, we've got a bunch of bearings and stuff that go with it, but there's actually quite a bit of hardware that goes with it. There's a lot of hardware. So we didn't put it all out here because we'd have a whole table full. So we do give you an exploded view, some instructions, some guidelines. Again, this is a kit that works, but every truck is slightly different. And so you're gonna need to be able to adjust it. Sometimes you might have to move this in a different spot to weld it. These are the pieces that will help mount to the hind joint that go onto the bed that helped push the bed door up. And so you'll have that part there. You can weld them on and then you can paint it. You can do whatever you want to do. And you can kind of see how those are welded on. We just build a little tab to weld those on so they are where they need to be. If I had one tip just through trial and error, lots of times we'll put these on thinking everything's great and not take into account how we're gonna run our exhaust or that these might come up and hit your chassis with a huge C-notch in it like these airbag trucks. So you really have to watch where you're putting this. You might have to set it outside of your frame, inside of your frame. You wanna make sure you have clearance for this thing to rotate back and forth. And when this is in the down position, Charlie, right, this is almost like. Parallel, yeah. It's vertical down. Yeah. Right, so you're starting in this position and then it's rotating up. Yeah. To get it up. And these kits kind of act like a garage door. If they get much of a load, they'll stop. So they won't just come down and strip all the gears out of your actuators. They'll actually stop for you so that way. So if it's getting in a bind as it's coming down and it keeps stopping on you, you wanna check and see, make sure both your sides are running evenly because if not, it'll bind up and it'll cut out on you. I'll see a lot of people, they'll take the actuator, they'll stick it in there and we've done it, right? And we've had to replace several until you kind of get a good amount of luck and then it works. But, and there's really not anything wrong with that. It's just oftentimes, it can be a little bit of extra weight because it'll say it'll push up 250 pounds, right? And you're like, well, I got two of them. What happens is it's, the weight is distributed so differently because it's pivot point is trying to pivot and push from such a far back position that it's actually the counterbalance of it is just much heavier than it seems to be when you're putting these together. So since we started putting a little bell crank in there and designing it this way, we haven't had one actuator that I know of fault on us. And so, especially if you're, know anything about Dakota Digital, everything takes a long time to get. And so it could really suck if you lose an actuator and you need another one and you got to wait six months to get it. Especially if that's how you're gonna put gas in your truck. Especially if you're gonna put gas in it. So anyways, I hope that's helpful for you. Charlie, thanks for helping us explain it. It's- You want me to run this down? Yeah, let's put it down. We'll run it down and just kind of show you how it goes down but it's pretty straightforward. Push the button. That's it. It's all done. Show them the little button inside. You can barely see it right through there. Okay, thanks guys. Hopefully you can go to our website and you'll see we have some in stock. I know we have a few kits in stock. This is kind of like, we've got like, I don't know, we got five or 10 sets we had made. Yeah, we have a bunch back there. Yeah, and so we got a lot of hardware for it. And so you'll just be able to go on the site, purchase it. Again, you know, you can kind of look at the instructions a little bit when you get it. You have questions, you definitely can call. We'll try to walk you through it and give you a hand getting installed. But if you're mechanical and you understand this kind of stuff, you should be able to figure it out. So be sure to go check out the website and look through all the little parts and pieces that we have for doing any kind of a swap or truck build. We're constantly adding more and more stuff all the time. Definitely like and subscribe to us and follow along. And with that, happy hot rodding.