55 R100 Truck Bed

The only shot I currently have of my bed

I have a R100 short bed for my truck that is in pretty bad shape, especially inside floor. It is rusted thru mostly at the tailgate end. It's also damaged the entire length. It's wavely, as if someone was dropping engines in the bed and they rolled around the floor. The side walls are fine.

I bought another bed online, it was supposed to have been another short bed, but when i got it, it's a long bed.
I was thinking of cutting out the floor of the long bed and fit it to the short bed. The long bed walls and frame is in good shape.

I'm pretty sure it'll be cost prohibitive for me to have one made, not knowing where to start on that task.

I hope the photos posted okay. I had to crop the shot of the long bed down a lot in order to get it to upload, due to it's size.

Does anyone have a better solution than cutting up the long bed, maybe a good short bed floor or a point in the right direction?

It's hard to make a recommendation without knowing your intentions for the truck and the level of restoration. If I were doing it to make a nice looking truck, I would probably put a wood bottom in the bed and not destroy the other one. But, I don't know your intentions and your preference.

Like Dan said, it all depends on your intentions for the truck. The bed of my truck looked a whole lot like your short bed. When my truck was going through a rebuild, I knew it would not be a work truck again and that I wanted it to look nice. The steel bed floor was removed and prepared for a wooden floor to go in. To remove the old steel floor required a SIGNIFICANT number of spot welds to be drilled out. There may be quicker ways to do it, but it all depends on what you want the finished product to look like or serve a purpose. Once the steel floor was out and the sides and front panel primed for paint, I prepared the boards and fitted it all up so that once paint had been applied, it all went together without any problems.

A local sheetmetal fabrication shop makes exact replacement beds for pickup. I was told that the cost was less than $500.
We will be rebuilding the short box for our L110 with treated wood. This box was OEM wood with metal hold down straps.
I have posted pictures of the design I will be using to make new replacement cross ribs.

I've seen replacement metal floors for GMC beds somewhere, I thought Mar-K had em, but don't see in their catalog, http://www.mar-k.com/index.php?p=innovations

pattern is basically the same on most metal bed floors,

This is what we will be using to make the cross-members for our short box. I see two of the cross-members on my 8 foot box have rusted through, so I have to assume all of them will need replacing.
I have not settled on the dimensions for the steel components yet, but they should be strong enough to withstand some loading. The original ribs/cross-members were pressed 16 gauge.
The front bulk-head of these boxes suffer rusting at the bottom where the bulk-head is spot-welded to the lower section of the box. I used a plasma-cutter to make a straight left to right cut. A WALTER flap-wheel on a 7 inch grinder will smooth the lower section of the box by removing the remaining rag pieces.

One treatment you can go to is a hybrid wood arrangement. I had a utility trailer that I got tired of replacing rotting wood on and replaced the floor with composite wood boards - deck boards. Made from recycled plastic. I used the stainless strips for a pick up truck and milled the composite boards to fit. If you can do anything with wood, you can do it to these boards. It all depends on what you want to end up with. Granted they are not cheap, but they are non slip and will last a long time. Just one of the options available to you if you think outside the box.

Thanks for the reminder about the recycled plastic "wood". I saw some of this product being demonstrated at a home renovation show. I thought, at that time, this would make a great wood replacement, wouldn't it. Using wud would be insanity.

It's hard to make a recommendation without knowing your intentions for the truck and the level of restoration. If I were doing it to make a nice looking truck, I would probably put a wood bottom in the bed and not destroy the other one. But, I don't know your intentions and your preference.

I'm just trying to put it back together as a decent old truck. It is not to be a show truck. I want to fix the bed as easily as possible and of course as inexpensive as possible. I do realize that is an oxymoron with this truck bed and inexpensive. I don't have a problem thinking outside the box in accomplishing this task, this too can be costly I know.

I do also know, to remove the bed is a bizillion spot welds, regardless to what I in up replacing it with.

Thanks for these inputs

j33------
Your description of your truck-bed sounds pretty much like mine was ( actually, from your photo, I think mine was worse ), and your need to re-do it as inexpensively as possible sounds exactly like my situation. I can send you photos of how I dealt with it, to make it a useable truck with as little spent as necessary, if you're interested. I spent just over $ 110 on material maybe another $ 20 for paint.
Unfortunately, I'm no good at " uploading " or " downloading " or " copy-and-paste "ing on this computer. I'm lucky to be able to figure out how to click on enough things to be able to reply to someone's post, such as yours here.
If you'd like me to mail ( as in, send-by- way- of- the- post office ) photos of what I did, with an explanation of my game-plan to do it, I'd be happy to-----send me a private message AND an email, as I sometimes get one but not the other.

oldihfan