Firewall swap
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Junior User
Joined: Feb 2005
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Firewall swap
The cab on my 85 F150 was eaten up with rust. A friend let me have a rust free 95 F450 cab. The cabs are identical except for the firewall. The 95 cab has a lot of the earlier cutouts sealed shut and lots of new openings. My 85 firewall is solid. I'm thinking of drilling out the spotwelds and swaping firewalls. Of course I will weld lots of bracing on my 95 cab before removing fire wall. Is this do-able? Any drawbacks? I am going to keep the 85 pretty much stock except the 3 on the tree will be replaced with 4 speed manual tranny with 4th being overdrive behind the straight 6.
Post Fiend
Joined: Jan 2000
Posts: 5,330
Likes: 17
From: Dryden, ON, Canada
No need to swap the whole firewall over. All you really need to transfer over is the bracket to hang the pedal bracket from, and the rest can be easily fabbed from there. We swapped a 94 cab onto my buddy's 86 last summer, and that was all we did. The brackets that bolt the dash to the sides of the cab needed a bit of tweaking, but it was all done after we hung the dash from the pedal bracket. The only real big difference is that the newer truck has raised tabs along the bottom of the windshield that the dash bolts to where an 80-86 is flat. You need to deal with these so the dash cap will fit properly.
Here's the 94 cab with the 86 pedals hung and the heater partway installed.:
We did have some sheetmetal and hole saws handy to block off unneeded holes and put new ones where we needed them, but, we put the dash in and had the wiring run in an evening. We did the whole project in a a week of evenings and a weekend, including pulling the cab from the donor truck. We swapped in a 5 speed while we were at it, changed a couple cross members, and replaced broken engine mounts etc while we were at it. If we had of just been swapping the cab over, it would have been probably a 2 day project.
But, not everyone has the tools we have for lifting... LOL
Here's the 94 cab with the 86 pedals hung and the heater partway installed.:
We did have some sheetmetal and hole saws handy to block off unneeded holes and put new ones where we needed them, but, we put the dash in and had the wiring run in an evening. We did the whole project in a a week of evenings and a weekend, including pulling the cab from the donor truck. We swapped in a 5 speed while we were at it, changed a couple cross members, and replaced broken engine mounts etc while we were at it. If we had of just been swapping the cab over, it would have been probably a 2 day project.
But, not everyone has the tools we have for lifting... LOL
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