1978 F150 Donor and 1975 F150 DD

I am trying to locate (figure out) where the spot welds are on the driver side of the bed that holds the outside skin on. I have a donor truck that has a near perfect skin and my DD has a huge dent in it and Im tryin to swap them. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Spot welded all long inside bed rail, some inside wheel well for inner panel. I think might be some by taillight but not sure.

 

Grab some 80 grit sand paper and load it on a flat sanding block

Sandthe bed rail inside the bed, inside the wheel well, along the bulkhead of the bed, along the tailgate post, and look for the divits that will be shinny after you give those areas a light sanding.

 

ok thanks, do you know if theres any between the cab and how much roughly would you say they are spaced apart

 

Ive swapped may bed sides over the years and trust me when I say there is a ton of spot welds and no ryme or reason when it comes to spacing.

Ive had spot welds on top of each other, and others that were spaced a ways apart.

Buy a good spot weld cutter, and get a good multi tool type scrapper to help seperate the remaining parts of the spot welds once you cut them.

 

i appreciate it, wouldnt happen to have a recommended spot weld cutter would you

 

only use blair, the other ones are junk. summit sells the blair and has good prices. I'd go ahead and get an extra bit for it too, cause if you let it walk at all, which is easy to do, it will tear them up. Use a center punch to punch all the spot welds once you find them. I used sandpaper to find them, marked them with marker to make it easy to find them, then center punched them all. even so it turned out I missed a few. There are a handful behind the taillight and there are like 6 or so where the bed side warps around the front panel, you have to pull the bed off the frame to drill those ones as they face forward. The ones in the taillight are tricky to get out, I ended up using a hammer to dent the taillight housing out of the way to drill them out. there are also a few in the fenderwell where the bedside attaches to the wheel tub.

You do not want to drill all the way through the weld, you just want to drill though the old bedside. so what works best is to pry something up between the inner bed and the bedside to put tension on it, that way the bedside will "pop" up as soon as you drill through the side enough to get the weld. I used a prybar but summit also sells a "steck spot weld buster" that is supposed to help. I've used an air chisel in an air hammer too but its very hard to do it clean. Drilling them out with a spot weld cutter is probably the easiest way.

 

only one I would recommend is this one by Blair

http://www.eastwood.com/review/product/list/id/2089/




you may also consider their spot weld panel seperating knife.

Panel Separating Knife


NEVER EVER WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THE HARBOR FREIGHT VERSION.

ONE CUT AND ITS JUNK!!!

 

yeah thats the one.

 

thanks for the help and input