[Jacques Reed]

Good Day,

I have been a bit quiet on here but still plodding away at my passion. I've had problems uploading photos to MLU for a long time. I deleted my saved password in Edge and that may have fixed the problem.

I addressed something this past week that has annoyed me for years.
A previous owner of my truck attached the GS body to the chassis with long bolts and drilled steel bars top and bottom. I had noticed years ago that the bottom flanges of the chassis rails at the mounting points had been bent slightly upwards about 3/16" by the bolts on the inside of the rail. There was never any crush blocks fitted to back up the bottom flange of the rail so any overtightening of the bolt would bend the flange.
I knew this was not original but kept it as a temporary solution. To me, there are too many bits to move and work loose by this method of attachment.

About 4 months ago I took measurements and had 5/8" diameter U-bolts fabricated as per original method of mounting the body.
First up I had to straighten the bottom rail. That was done as shown with a small button jack and scrap I had laying around to back up the top flange. The channel was an offcut from a retainer wall and the 1" threaded rod and nuts came with some other junk I acquired and kept "just in case".
A bit of pumping and checking and rechecking got it back to shape.

I have seen wooden crush blocks here on MLU and they looked like they were one piece and had the groove routed out. Not having a router, I decided, however, to fabricate them by laminating three pieces of hardwood with glue and screws. Of note, is that to have full contact with the bottom flange, the blocks have to have a taper of 1:16 at the bottom and have to be mirror images. I set my circular saw on 3.5 degrees which is 1:16 slope to cut the bottom of the blocks. I cut the top of the blocks square and about 1mm larger, then test fitted and adjusted by sanding so that they were a tight fit between the chassis rails.

Maybe not 100% original but ten times better than what I had before.

Hope this is of some interest.

Cheers,