Turning a single wheel bed into dually bed... Any advise?
 

Hay fellas. I'm turning my single wheel into a dually. I'm wondering if anyone on here has done this. I'm going to have to cut the wheel arches to fit the oem 1st gen fenders. I've got the fenders and gaskets. The donor bed was too rusted to save. Thanks in advance! :rocking:

Should just bolt in??:rocking:

Nope. Believe it or not the dually bed is different. The wheel arches are much bigger.

Yeah you would have to do like you said and cut them larger and use the brackets and mounting hardware from the donor. Other than that the bed itself is bolt on. Good luck and take pics :pca1:, my bed is pretty bad other than the fenders, and straight beds are much more plentiful.

I lucked out on my fenders. Found them along with the gaskets in perfect shape for 200 bucks. I'm restoring this truck. I had it down to just a frame and motor/trans. But once it's done I'll have me a clean gen1 with my 22.5 wheel setup and new suspension for just under 5k...... Only downside is all the time you have in it.

It will be dang neer inposible to cut out the SRW bed for the dually fenders, you would be weeks ahead if you cut the fenders to fit the bed and glass in some L brackets to bolt up to your bed, i have seen it done on a gas truck and it looks good, only thing is he didn't use the pipping gasket between the bed and fender, he just sealed it and painted it.

i just went through the conversion from SRW to DRW, and i am as tight as bark on a tree so i went the cheepest route, you can use spacers to get the rearend to the right width, but it's cheaper and safer to just come up with a D70 dually rearend, (beware a cab chassy dually rearend is not as wide as a regular dually), fome my figgers a dually rearend is 7 inches wider than a SRW D70.

here is a few pics of the conversion, i went with spacers i made first but ended up going the way i should have in the first place with a dually D70.

Darwin

the truck before

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the reason for the conversion

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here we go

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this is why a dually D70 is safer than spacers, note the size difference in the hub bearings from a D70 dually to a D70 SRW.

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contuned .........

And on we go.....

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you can see here where the rearend is not wide enough with the spacers i made, one of the reasons i went with a DRW D70.


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still needs wet sanding and buff, it's hard to paint a truck in a pole barn without getting dust in the clear.

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after the wet sand and buffing.

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...Y/P8061400.jpg

here you can see the DRW rearend is the correct width, looks much better IMO.


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and finaly how it is now.

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The end.....

Damon good looking truck

Ell yah truck looks sweet man. I'm actually using 22.5" semi wheels on the truck. They will be pretty wide to begin with. I'm only spacing the wheels enough to clear the wheel wells in the bed. I'm a machinist myself... So I've got access to just about any tooling/equipment I need.
So the dually rear end is actually wider than a single wheel? I thought they were narrower. Not saying I don't believe you or anything! This stuffs still rather new to me. Thanks for any input and again, the truck looks sweet! :rocking:

No sir a DRW is wider, to allow for the extreem back spacing of the dually wheels to miss the springs and inner fender wells. you can put spacers on your SRW D70, they need to be at least 2 inches per side, to clear stock wheels, you will need to put 5 1/2 inch 9/16 studs in the hubs ( which they don't make ) i used grade 8 bolts and made a thin plate with 8 holes for the studs (bolts) then welded them to that plate, then drilled and taped the plate to bolt to the inside of the hub to hold the bolts in place as they are not pressed in the hub and would fall inside when you take off the lug nuts.

it worked fine and i hauled my camper over 2,000 miles before i changed to the DRW D70, just know that the inside ( loaded bearing ) is much much bigger on a DRW D70, so if you are going to be hauling lots of weight the smaller bearing on a SRW could fail.

i'm shure there are other ways but this is how i did it.

Darwin