my accident

Justin · Post by **Justin** » Sun Aug 10, 2003 5:41 pm

Just to fore-warn people with body lifts, when you get hit from the rear or side, expect more damage than a small dent. As most allready know, I backed into a telephone pole last friday going very slow. Mind you i do not have a bumper so my roll pan and tailgate got smashed. Well today i noticed my bed was way out of alignment. I took a closer look at the spacing between the cab and the bed and noticed that on the passanger side (side where I hit the pole from rear), there were

a) two points on the top of the bed where the sheet-metal bent up

b) the bed pushed into the cab and made a big dent on the rear wall of the cab.

The more and more I see this whole "crew cab modifications" is a tease yet very dangerous....

#1, if i would have left the bumper alone with no roll pan, it would have taken the impact, I could have added a trailer hitch and stored my spare where it is supposed to be

#2, if i wouldn't have installed the body lift, possibly no dent to the cab, wouldn't have been able to ad 31's and get terrible highway climbing driving

It just seems like every modifaction you do, there has to be other modifications to make it work. Like my grandfather says "just drive it, don;t do anything to it except add bugdeflectors, mud flapps and windguards". I should take his advice on the next truck

Rusty · Post by **Rusty** » Sun Aug 10, 2003 6:19 pm

This is the biggest reason I ditched doing anything more to my CrewCab and am focusing on my S-10 Blazer I bought a few weeks back. Of course my wife had a little to do with this as well. She wouldn't say it at first but she didn't like the idea of my "messing up" something that still had a healthy payment book attached to it. I guess I can't blame her.

It's funny though. When I mentioned doing even minor mods to my crew I got grumbles and groans and dirty looks. I mentioned dropping a 350 V8 into the Blazer the other day and I get "Sure honey, it's your toy. Do whatever you want!"

Mike H. · Post by **Mike H.** » Sun Aug 10, 2003 6:47 pm

Interesting. You are probably right about the bed lift blocks leaning and allowing your bed to hit the cab. Unfortunately, no real way of knowing if your bed would have hit the cab without them. It definitely couldn't have moved as much without the lift blocks. How fast do you estimate that you hit it?

A bumper would have likely saved you a lot of the damage. You would just be out a bumper, and maybe the bumper would have gotten into your bed sheetmetal a little.

Have you pulled out any bed lift blocks and looked them over (and the mount locations)? Were any damaged, or any bolts bent slightly? Or was there any bending/crushing/twisting of the sheetmetal contact points of the bed? Or the frame?

The bed mounts are definitely much weaker than the body. The body mounts are 3" diameter (7.06 sq.in.) and sit in a nice round cup contacting the entire surface area of the block. The wide surface dimension will resist bending moments much better. However, the 2" diameter bed blocks (3.14 sq.in.) have less than half the surface area of the body blocks. Using larger diameter blocks alone still won't equal the body mounts, because the bed/frame contact points are not very large either.

I noticed when installaing mine last weekend that the bed mounts didn't make me feel real warm and fuzzy. Same with the front "bumper" mounts. Now I may just fab something else for the bed out of 2" square steel tube or Unistrut, and anchor them a little better (like maybe tack weld as well as bolt). And maybe a wood block or two down low between bed and body in case of emergency.

Or maybe order 6 of the 3" diameter lift blocks from PA and alter the bed mount locations, like maybe with a 3" diameter sheetmetal disk on top and bottom. I'll look it over this weekend when I fab & install my gap guards.

Conman · Post by **Conman** » Mon Aug 11, 2003 8:47 am

I've been thinking about a Body lift for a while now after determining I don't want the problems of the suspension lift. I've determined since I don't wany any issues with the dealer, I'm just going to get rear lift shackles and a 1" t-bar crank and live with small tires(29 or 30"). I figure to help with the low looks, I'm going to get a safari rack to make it look taller.

Back to your post, I'm not 100% sure the body lift allowed more damage than without the body lift. But if the hit was really hard, it would have more of a chance since the bolts are longer than stock.

Let us know how it goes.

Regards,

Conway

Post by **HenryJ** » Mon Aug 11, 2003 3:31 pm

Mike H. wrote:
I noticed when installaing mine last weekend that the bed mounts didn't make me feel real warm and fuzzy. Same with the front "bumper" mounts. Now I may just fab something else for the bed out of 2" square steel tube or Unistrut, and anchor them a little better (like maybe tack weld as well as bolt). And maybe a wood block or two down low between bed and body in case of emergency.

Or maybe order 6 of the 3" diameter lift blocks from PA and alter the bed mount locations, like maybe with a 3" diameter sheetmetal disk on top and bottom. I'll look it over this weekend when I fab & install my gap guards.

The bed lift is much better than previous body lifts that I have used. The 3" lift on my '86 had only four blocks (two front and two rear) no support for the middle of the bed

I had to add some sections of rectangle tubing very similar to what comes with our 2" kit.

Unless you plan on hauling max. payload regularly, I would'nt worry about it.

Something that may have contributed to the "cab dent" situation is that the Isuzu bed has pretty tight cab/bed clearances (1" or less) most other vehicles have more.