This very fine ’66 F100 moved in a couple of blocks away some months ago. Yes, Custom Cab and Tu-Tone paint job; a real looker, except for the non-stock wheel covers. But I didn’t know it had a secret, until the other day when it lifted up its bed so elegantly. What a waste; this truck is undoubtedly way too nice to be hauling gravel, dirt, rocks and compost, garden clippings, chopped tress, and just garbage. When I think of all the endless times I’ve unloaded mine….this almost brings tears to my eyes. Why didn’t I put one of these on my truck back in 1987?
I wonder what the capacity of this lift is. I’m a notorious overloader.
Anybody recognize this unit and know its capacity? I would be a little anxious about some of the more extreme loads I’ve carried. But it would dump a load of compost nicely, as well as a small load of gravel. And all of the yard clippings, although I pull those off with a rope.
I think one of the reasons I did this was that I always imagined getting an F250 for the more serious jobs, but never got around to it. Sound familiar?
Really nice truck! I remember seeing ads for dump bed kits in magazines when I was a kid in the mid-seventies…
Sweet truck. There is something about the grille that us unique to the 66 that makes it my favorite of the entire series. I am also a sucker for the turquoise paint.
I can’t make out the hood emblem – six or V8? The dump bed is interesting. I wonder if the lack of attachment points to the frame up front reduces load capacity even without using the dump feature? There could be some nasty side loads on that rear hinge with a heavily loaded bed going through a corner.
V8 and automatic.
I agree about those concerns.I didn’t look real closely, but I assume there must be something that the bed engages with at the front, otherwise it would be downright dangerous. Still, it looks a wee bit under-engineered for some of the loads I have carried.
I helped Dad build a couple of barge wagons (well, I held the wrench on the bolts while he tightened the nuts, but I was really proud to do that) as a young child, so I recall how sturdy a box frame needs to be. You start with two big longitudinal beams, then put multiple cross-framing pieces on top of those. Then you build a perimeter frame around the cross pieces, and only then build the box on top of that. The hydraulic cylinder attaches to the frame of the box underneath the longitudinal beams, and the pivots at the back attach similarly. This truck box looks pretty good in terms of where everything is mounted, but it wouldn’t last very long with more than a few branches from the back yard-nothing to keep the front from collapsing if the load sticks in the front, nothing to keep it from twisting or moving side-to-side, little really to keep the attachment points for the cylinder from punching right through the floor. Better to get yourself an old body-on-frame (F-250, 300 cube and 4-speed, or HD three-speed with OD, right?), add the hydraulics and stake bed and then you can really overload it.
I wish I had one too. It does make me thankful that I at least have an older model Toyota PU that I can easily unload items without being an Olympic high jumper.
With the bed raised It does make it easier to work on the back half of the truck.
If you’re really a born overloader then please leave this classic alone !
Look at the factory/standard chassis, cargo bed and how the bed is secured at the rear end. Also the rear overhang, the whole truck will tip up when dumping a heavy load. Although I think it wouldn’t make it that far….
I strongly advise to only haul a full load of table tennis balls.
I typed in pickup dump truck conversion kit and one of the first to pop up was Northern Tool. They have one for under $1400. Most of the concerns about the front of the bed could be satisfied with a little welding and a retaining pin like on the front of tow dollys.
Paul, if you don’t want to spring for that sort of money to offload the truck there is another option. I bought a fabric unloader from Northern. It was on the same page when I just googled this search. Used it with my half ton trailer. Spread the fabric before loading. The crank operated roller hooks to the tailgate. When you get to where you are going just drop the gate and use the armstrong powered roller. Take it off when you are unloaded. Doesn’t require any alteration to anything. Have used it for dirt, sand, and rock. They advertise for firewood. They last if you store them inside. Made sense for me.
I’ve got one of those sold under the Load Handler brand name. Had it for 15 or 16 years. I’ve gotten a lot of good use out of it and with a plastic bed liner I’ve been able to unload ~2 tons with it on more than one occasion but tweaked the crank handle doing so. Unfortunately it also really tweaked the tail gate and a bit of the bed on my F350. I had side boards on and was helping a friend clean up his mother’s back yard where they had been piling branches for about 20 years. We’d fill it 4′ high climb in and stomp it down and load some more. Rather than the stuff falling off once it past the tail gate it had turned into a loaf weighing ~1.2 tons. All of it balanced on the tail gate until the gate cables snapped, the load tipped and I was able to drive out from underneath it.
That’s a “gotcha” for sure. Speaks more of the technique used than it does for the unloader or the tailgate cables. I’ve bent a tailgate but never that.
Absolutely my fault, no doubt about that. I think it actually speaks very well of the un-loader that it was able to get that loaf out of there. At the time the side boards were set up at a slope with the bottom in the first groove outside of the wheel well and the top attached to boards in the stake pockets. There were some reliefs for the wheel wells that had old inner tube attached to the outside. That meant that the stuff got wedged in between those pieces of 7/16″ OSB pretty good as we kept stomping it down. I’m really surprised that the sheet didn’t pull out from under the loaf. I was pretty impressed with how well the tailgate and its cable held up when I exiting the place and found out that it had held ~1.2 tons a lot better and a lot longer than one would think it could.
That looks like a compressed air hose going to the cylinder. The cylinder looks like perhaps 3 or 4 inches maximum in diameter, so based on 120 psi air the cylinder would produce 850 to 1500 pounds of force. It has some leverage in the linkage as well so it would perhaps triple or quadruple that.
In other words, it would have enough strength to lift the bed with nearly any conceivable load in it…or to punch the bracket through the bottom of the bed when it’s structure gives way.
It looks like there are make shift pins at what were the front bed mount locations to engage the holes in the frame to keep the front of the bed located when down. All in all I’d be most worried about the bed getting tweaked from trying to dump a heavy load the frame for the cylinder is just connected between the center to bed supports. The higher capacity ones they used to sell back in the day had frame rails that ran the entire length of the bed. In most cases that meant the bed sat ~2″ higher than stock.
Tipping bodies are fairly common here lots of inported Jappas come with a factory setup, the chassis is likely the first failure point if you work this thing to capacity hauling gravel or anything heavy and the pickup bed on F100s isnt very strong either if you start dumping heavy objects in to it.
ANY factory pick-up truck is actually way too light duty to carry a heavy load, like wet sand.
Remember, it’s much easier to pull a heavy load than to carry it.
Just look at the frame rails, axles and suspension of a straight 10×8 dump truck, then you know enough. Fully loaded these things weigh more than 110,000 lbs, and that’s on public roads.
There are factory pickups are rated to carry up to ~6,000lbs of payload, my F350 is rated for ~4,000lbs.
The biggest legal load in the US w/o a special permit is 105,500lbs, and for that you need a minimum of 6 or 7 axles depending on your state and the road you are taking it on. The max for a simple tandem axle dump is 60,000lbs.
Eric, I would rather call your F350 a “real” truck instead of a pick-up.
The 10×8 is strictly Dutch. On-road their legal GVW is about 110,000 lbs.
If you keep it off-road you can load another 20,000 lbs or so.
No way you can drive these things fully loaded into Germany or Belgium.
Ginaf and Terberg are the Dutch specialists, but other truckmakers make them too, like MAN, Mercedes and Iveco.
Here’s a picture of a Ginaf 10×8. As you can see 4 of the 5 axles are steerable. There’s no way you can get it around a tight corner on narrow roads otherwise. Most of them got a hydro-pneumatic suspension and are very comfortable to drive.
Wow. I could’ve used this today when I hauled a load of compost from the community yard waste facility to my flower beds.
The only reason why I’d hesitate to put one on my F-150 is because the fuel fillers are integral to the sides of the bed. But on the other hand, it sure would be handy to be able to simply tilt the bed up whenever a fuel pump needed to be changed!
All this is now having me think about putting on an entry level dump body on my F-150. Surely somebody has done it on a simple 1/2 ton. Right???
You might want to try one of these they work great. http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200576939_200576939 I’ve had one for years and have used it for some very heavy loads. It does work best with a drop in bed liner and you will need the optional slip sheet if you’ve got a spray in liner.
Well, that didn’t take long. First shot on Google…
http://www.truckcraft.com/productDetail.asp?id=2&cID
Plenty of them out there Stan. This one might be as cheap as any.:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/hydraulic-dump-bed-conversion-zmaz85zsie.aspx#axzz2Yyf0Ir9y
As for the hoist: I USED to know the name; because all our (the village I worked for) trucks, one-ton stakes and 2-1/2 ton dumps, used that hoist. All but the 1966 C-60; which had a telescoping hoist.
A truck equipment company in Cattaraugus, NY (one county over) put them together for us. But…it’s not that heavy-duty; and looking at it, you can see why. The stress on the pivot pins must be tremendous; and there looks to be a heavy mechanical DISadvantage. Meaning, much movement of bed and load for little motion on the assembly. It was designed for compact installation, not hard service.
As to the concept: I first saw this on 1973 Ford trucks at the dealer one block over from my childhood home. Pretty-frikkin-slick operation, hey? But some five years later, and I’m working with dumps…not so impressed. That kind of abuse on a standard (or even braced) pickup box would spring the tack-welds in DAYS. And then take the shape out of the box-bed in WEEKS.
No sale. If someone had a style-side pickup (we had a lot of farmers or guys from farm-families working at our DPW) and wanted to work it…our shop foreman would say, take the bed off and store it. Get a flatbed out of a junkyard, or make one…but do NOT work that pretty truck bed.
Paul your posts on this truck and the “Ranger” from last week piqued my interest in old Ford trucks. So I went back and found the article on the ’62 Styleside, great read! Was this the generation that passed Chevy in sales? Not a truck guy here so I don’t know – the thing I remember most about the Ranger was the Falcon Sprint center console!
Belated thanks to Eric for the great info on the Ford 300cid getting EFI in its final years. I thought it went from carbed 300 to EFI V6.
“Was this the generation that passed Chevy in sales?”
I don’t think Ford overtook Chevy in fullsize truck sales on a consistent basis until the late ’70s, although they usually weren’t too far behind, and would have a year when they poked through to #1 every once in a while.
The obvious utility of that dump bed points out the pointlessness of owning a pickup truck without one.
Interesting unit. I wonder why the two-tone is not on the cab back panel. Perhaps it got damaged and never completely repaired. You mention the non-stock wheel covers. They actually are stock Ford, but do not belong on this model. They came out on the ’71 full sized cars. I agree with the other commentators that wonder what holds the front part of the bed in place when it is lowered. Since the rear part of the bed and the bumper are both mounted on an extension of the frame that is hinged, it doesn’t seem like it would do too well in the event of a rear end collision. But, there is no doubt it would be very handy at times.
Those 71 Ford wheelcovers had a long life on Ford trucks, adorning pickups and vans well into the late 70s if not the early 80s.
I thought it would be neat to post this classic bleu and white two-tone dump truck here since it also has an obvious (to truck enthusiasts) link to the US of A.
This fully restored classic Ginaf, owned by a trucking company nearby, is clearly based on a REO military truck. For many years Ginaf converted REO M34 and M52 trucks into dump trucks. The main conversions were a new steel cab and a diesel engine swap, they often got a Leyland~DAF diesel engine.
I remember these trucks very well, as they were still in use in the seventies.
After these models Ginaf switched to DAF components, like the cab and engine.
(Since 1997 DAF is a member of the Paccar family)
Sweet ride. How much reinforcement did you put on the truck bed? It will look more awesome when you put a bike at the back or an atv. cool huh? My truck was my best partner in racing. every week i out and load my bike at back for a trail on the moutainside.