Quote:
Originally Posted by 1930-Pickup
It appears that I must concede that the boards are grooved on both sides. Its good to get to the truth  , but bad that my bed wood is not factory original 
My truck was taken off the road and stored indoors approximately 1963. It was stored near Fullerton CA which is a pretty good rust slow-growth area.
It was returned to the road about 2014 by the PO.
The bed wood is aged, cracked, and warped. The underside hardware seen in the photo (posted earlier) is rusty and may be seized. The top of the boards are properly sized and grooved.
Prior to the mid-1950's, were Model A vendors supplying wood bed kits, and would it have been a fairly common practice to replace bed wood? |
In the early-70s, we replaced the bed wood in our 30 CCPU. I don't recall there being any kits at that time. We went to a company that still made beds for big trucks much like Ford did. They cut and grooved the boards to our specs (grooved one side only - we didn't know better at the time). They also supplied the steel strips. A pic of the bed is below.
I agree it would have been inefficient to run a board twice to cut grooves on both sides. But I suspect Henry had a machine that cut both grooves in one pass. Not sure I buy the grooves being so they could hide bad spots. I'd guess it was so the assembler could install the board without having to orient it top and bottom - that would have saved a second or two on the line. I do recall reading that the bent corner of the square washer goes between the boards - can't recall where I saw it but I seem to remember it was some "official" source.