Building an ALUMINUM Flatbed for my Project Truck!.

Hi there and welcome to the channel. My name is Waldo and in this video we're going to be building a flatbed for this project truck out of aluminum which is going to make it strong and lightweight. We're also going to be using some welding techniques that are pretty neat. This is Brandon, my 2005 GMC 2500 HD. I bought it at a salvage auction and at only $3,400 I got a heck of a deal. It has the highly desirable 6.6 liter Duramax V8 diesel engine. My goal is to modify this truck tastefully while bringing it back to its former glory. So I have built a flatbed before as you can see by the one behind me here. I have built things out of aluminum before but I have never built a flatbed out of aluminum and in my research for the design of this I discovered two interesting things that you might not know about. The first thing is that commercially available aluminum flatbeds don't actually have as much aluminum as you would expect. They're basically aluminum skins with a steel frame underneath. Now steel has some advantages like it's cheap and it's strong however it also has some big disadvantages and that is rust and corrosion. That's a big deal to me because if I use steel then I have to paint it and the whole point of building an aluminum flatbed is so that I don't have to deal with any of that stuff. So I've decided that I'm going to make my entire flatbed out of aluminum. Doing that also helps avoid a problem which is attaching the steel frame to the aluminum skin together. That just kind of adds complexity whereas if I use 100 aluminum then I can just weld it together and it's pretty easy to do. As for the second thing, most flatbeds that are made of steel use sheets of diamond plate for the deck just like this one which uses eighth inch thick material. Now aluminum flatbeds can't really get away with that because aluminum is far too weak for that and you'd have to make it way too thick in order to be strong enough and that would be really expensive and it would be a lot heavier than necessary. So in my research I discovered that aluminum flatbeds typically use something like this right here. These are extruded aluminum planks. These are one inch thick and they're six inches wide. They interlock. They're made out of aluminum so they're very strong and here have a closer look at these. They have extruded ribs here which make it much stronger while maintaining its lightness. Now I have a very special guest coming who's going to help me weld this thing together using some really cool pulse welding technology and I only have a little bit of time before he gets here so in order to be as prepared as possible I really need to get going and start cutting up some of these frame members so that when he does arrive we can start welding and focus on that as much as possible. So let's get to work. All right so I have some aluminum stock here that I'm going to use to make the frame. This right here is four by two by quarter inch thick wall rectangular tubing and I have a bunch more over there. I also have some three by two and I'm going to cut this into a bunch of pieces as specified by my design. To accomplish that cutting I'm going to use my saw here which has a blade that is intended for cutting ferrous metals so not really intended for cutting aluminum. I'm sure it'll work for aluminum at least on the first cut. I guess the question is will the aluminum get all gunked up in the teeth because aluminum is a lot softer than steel or will I be fine? I have no idea but let's find out. Well I guess I'll start out with the main frame rails of it which are going to be 78 inches long with regular old 90 degree cuts. Looks like it might have gotten a little bit gunked up. I have discovered that my wood cutting miter saw does a heck of a job cutting this like way better than my steel cutting saw so I am going to use this for the rest of the cuts and also this is a lot more precise when it comes to cutting angles. I mean this is only eighth inch material but it goes through it like butter seriously it cuts it almost easier than it cuts wood. So with all the pieces of the frame cut up and ready to be welded together I'm now going to focus on the mounts for the bed and I'm going to use the original mounting holes for the factory bed. There's eight of them and they're basically in pairs so there's a mounting hole right here and another one right here and there are basically three other pairs of mounting holes a lot like this one at the other corners. By taking a piece of aluminum like this I can drill some mounting holes in the bottom of it have it sit here and then the rest of the frame will be welded onto this. So I am drilling a nine sixteenths hole because I'm going to use m12 mounting bolts so this should be oversized enough to give me the wiggle room that I need. Nice. So I also need to cut out a little hole here to avoid a bolt and a nut that's sticking out of the frame. I'm going to go with a hole that's a bit bigger than necessary just to be safe. These hole saws work great on aluminum and wood and things like that if I were cutting steel I would definitely want to use my mag drill instead though. Oh I can't forget these I got some nylon washers here that will go in between the aluminum and the steel frame here. So I got all four of the mounts on we got the back and we got the front up here and basically we are ready to start welding as soon as my guest shows up tomorrow. Tomorrow. So this is my guest this is Peter Zila from Zila Industrial Repairs and he is probably one of the best aluminum welders on YouTube. He has his own YouTube channel it's Zila Z-I-L-A and he is going to show me how to use this machine right here which is an HTP and this is probably if not the best one of the best at least machines that you can get for aluminum welding and Peter is going to explain why. This machine is small, portable, affordable and it welds jet boats and it welds turbodiesel mustangs and it welds flatbeds for pickup trucks I guess. And I guess you're mentioning those because you've appeared on some other YouTube channels that my viewers have probably you know heard of or seen like Cletus McFarland. I may have helped one or two other YouTubers out on occasion yes. Yes he appears on all the YouTube channels so yeah this machine is really awesome. I mean did you guys see this this is not a spool gun but we're going to be welding aluminum with this compact gun it's it's pretty neat. Yeah absolutely it's nice fits everywhere and it's a whole different experience than your regular big box spool gun setup. So this is the Pro Pulse 220 MTS made by HTP and really the pulse is one of the most important things of all the really cool features it has the pulse is what gives us a lot of the control over the puddle it gives us the ability to weld out of position to weld thin material where normally we would be restricted filling big gaps now this is all it makes the process so much easier when you weld with that machine. So I hate when this happens but my microphone battery must have died so we're just gonna have to do this in voiceover. Basically we have a nice flat surface here on which we can build the frame of the flatbed. Here Peter came up with a really cool idea to hang the welding machine from the rafters so the MIG torch can easily reach the whole frame without having to move the welding machine around. Pretty neat. We'll start out with Peter on the MIG torch. So that's why I decided to do more than just one pack yeah because the material is so cold. Aluminum has two properties that make it a little bit tricky to weld when compared to mild steel. The first is that aluminum conducts heat really really well and what that means is that when you start welding a joint the surrounding metal wants to suck the heat out of the weld. That can result in temperatures in the weld that are too cold in order to have good enough penetration and that's called a cold start. When the ambient temperatures are really cold like the conditions that we're dealing with in this video one of the ways that you can help is by preheating the metal with a torch. Another thing you can do is turn the welder up so that it just puts more heat into the weld. The second property of aluminum that makes it a little bit trickier to weld than mild steel is that aluminum has a really low melting point. The effect of that is that when you've been welding your joint for a little while the heat buildup in there can easily make it so that the aluminum just gets too hot and your weld blows out which is a disaster. The solution to that is to be able to reduce the heat in the weld once you get going. Now a lot of welding machines have a hard time with this and it results in cold starts and you can only weld really short segments but luckily the HTP machine that we're using actually has some cool features to help us deal with this. Peter got a little bit carried away when he was welding and tacking things in place but I'm going to start on this piece right here. It's nice and square. We also discovered that a little bit of preheating of the joints is very helpful out here because it's so cold out today. I probably should have kept going but yeah as far as the tack goes it looks like we have enough penetration in there. We're trying to avoid fully welding things right now until we get some more pieces tacked in to help avoid warping so that's why there's kind of a little tack there. That's about what I expected. So you know what your other problem is now? Here you're missing an inch. Either you need to replace these with a 2x4 instead of a 2x3. I could have done that yeah and actually I still can. I don't know we'll figure something out. I'm gonna get these to attach to each other somehow. Yeah so would you take a look at that. We got the frame all assembled. It's dry fit sort of in place there to see how it fits and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Everything looks pretty good. Now this is not fully welded yet. We still got a bunch of joints like I think that one there's an example of one that's not done yet. We got this edge here raised up an inch above this because the decking is going to sit flat on here and the top of the decking is going to be flush with this. So the mounts here on the back they do line up pretty well so we'll be able to weld those together. The mounts on the front however they are a lot wider than these frame rails. I was expecting them to be a fair amount wider. I wasn't expecting them to be quite that much wider but I think I'm actually going to switch and use 2x4 tubing for this instead of 2x3. That'll bring it up to the same height as this. I mean I got a piece of one inch lumber here supporting it but that'll bring the top of this up to the bottom of this so I can weld those together and then for the back here I will gusset them together so that's nice and strong. So with that we've made some progress but there's still a ton of work left to do. We still need to do the deck, we need to get some sides on this, we need a headache rack, we need toolboxes, and well before I can do any of that I need to finish fully welding this thing. I'm used to going slow with steel or whatever and this thing zips right through. That is crazy. Look at that sweet fit. We got this back piece in here and it fits nicely and the whole deck is looking really nice. Well it is now several weeks later. Peter had to go back to Wisconsin and I had to get back to working on building my snowplow before winter was over. So with that done we're back on the aluminum flatbed and we'll pick up where we left off. So with these stake pockets welded on next I have the rub rail here and what I'm going to do is I have three pieces of round tube that I'm going to weld on in between the stake pockets. So these are going to serve as a point to wrap a chain around so that I can secure loads that way. Now the idea is that I'm going to weld these to the flat bar before I weld the flat bar on here because if I waited until after I welded the flat bar on here it'd be really tricky to get into the back here to fully weld this end of it. Well hey that looks pretty good huh? Look at that. So now to bend this rub rail in I'm going to use a clamp. Now this is 6061 aluminum which does not like to bend. It's one of the more rigid types of aluminum but that said this is only a pretty small angle of a bend so I think I'm going to be able to get away with it. The worry was that it might crack right here but it didn't. It looks perfect. I am going to use some of this nice flammable cardboard to protect the truck from welding spatter. Would you take a look at that? That came out looking pretty darn good if you ask me. I've decided that I'm going to work on the headache rack next because frankly I'm excited about how awesome it's going to look. So the challenge here is to have the headache rack roughly match the contour of the cab and I've decided that I'm going to have the headache rack extend past the cab just a tiny little bit which I think will be good for looks. Now the last headache rack that I built which was for my other truck Billy Bob that came out really well but frankly I think I'm kind of lucky that it came out so well because it was a lot of guesswork as for figuring out the angles and the lengths of all the members. For this I'm going to be a little bit more scientific about it and I bought this digital protractor which measures angles very precisely and that's going to help me visualize what angles I need and then I'll be able to cut them out on my wood miter saw which is also very precise. So the very first piece is going to come in at about an 8 degree angle and then as for how long it's going to be I think 11 inches looks pretty good. You know what I've decided that I'm going to use some wooden 2x4s to mock this up so this angle right here is 14 degrees and that's looking pretty good so that would make this a 7 degree cut. So set that to 7 degrees look at how precise this is super awesome something like that so far. Now how the heck do I weld these together? So for this next one I'm thinking 20 degrees and then I'll start out with about 5 inches and we'll see how that looks. Well I think I'm close enough to start cutting up some aluminum I might end up making this member like a little bit longer and then I'll re-evaluate this top one once I get there but I can go ahead and cut these out and start welding them together. All right so this weld right here is a really good example of how this remote control saved my butt. I probably did a little bit more preheating on this than was really necessary and then I went in on full power because that's what I've been doing on this quarter inch material because this thing really takes a lot of heat in order to weld. However I quickly found out that it was way too hot I could see the weld starting to sink in and getting pretty close to blowing out so what did I do? I was able to bring the remote control down with my thumb it lowered the power and I was able to finish the weld without having to stop or anything like that and look at that I mean it got full penetration and that is a nice strong weld. When I first got this I wasn't so sure about the remote control but now oh my goodness it is amazing. If you're gonna get one of these for aluminum welding definitely get the remote control. All right this time I'm switching over to pulse because this is a butt joint so it really doesn't require that much heat and the pulse will give me a lot more control over this. With pulse welding you can tell the sound is quite a bit different and that's because the pulsing itself makes a distinct pitch based on the frequency of the pulse. Towards the end of there you can hear the pitch getting lower as I was using my thumb to reduce the power on the remote control and it worked really well. Once again I was able to weld the whole thing without having any issues. If you watch closely right here I had the power too high and the weld started to sink and almost blow through. I quickly adjusted the power level paused to fill in the hole and then continued welding the rest of the joint. Once again it's a satisfactory weld where I didn't have to stop halfway through and the remote control saved my butt. I changed the angle right here to be 30 degrees instead of 20 because I think this probably will look better. All right so I finished both of these upright members and I've got them in place on my makeshift workbench here and they're the right distance apart and now all I have to do is measure this top bit here which I can see is 51 and a half inches. That is a perfect fit. All right well now that I have the main shape of this thing finished let's get it up here and see what it looks like. Yeah I'm pretty happy with how it looks. It contours to the cab pretty well. It's a good height. It looks good from the front. Now it's going to be a couple inches farther forward. You guys probably see a little bit of a gap over here because you're off to one side plus it is farther away from the cab than it's going to be but when you actually take a walk around and look at it I mean it looks darn good. So it's time to build the rest of this thing. I need a cross member going across here. I gotta fill in this. I need bars here to protect the glass. We need lights up top here. There's really a lot of stuff to do. Well I want to take a picture for Instagram but it wouldn't be complete without first installing some of these lights. Well how do you like that? If you're not already following me on Instagram my username is Waldo Welds and there's a link down in the description below. It looks like my workbench has a headache rack. I got a little bit carried away with the camera turned off and I made this nice recessed license plate mounting location. There's room under here for a license plate light and a backup camera as well and then I also drilled holes for the identification lights. These are going to be three quarter inch marker lights. Don't try this at home. So I think I'm going to do taillights next and I'm going to do something pretty special. Now I really like the look of the recessed diagonal taillights that are found on CM truck beds. I think those are some of the best looking truck beds around and I'm going to base what I do on that except those have three lights. I'm going to do four lights because this truck has its turn signals wired separately from the brake lights which means that I can easily add a fourth light and I think it'll look good and it'll be very unique. That actually looks really good. Would you take a look at that? A four-wheel drive truck out here at home in the mud. I wanted to get it out of the shop out here in the light so we could get a really good look at it and I think it's looking pretty darn good. There is a lot of stuff left to do. I have to build a rear bumper for it which is going to change the looks of it hugely for the better. I have trim to add, toolboxes, of course it has to be wired up so that all of the lights work, and there are lots of finishing details as well. All of those things I'm going to do in a part two video so we're going to call this one part one. So I'm working on getting my class A CDL. I got my permit last month right before the new federal regulations kicked in and I want to say thanks to the viewer who gave me a heads up on those. I'm trying to do this without going to a commercial driver's school because number one they're really expensive. It's over eight thousand dollars for the one nearby and number two the course takes seven weeks which is way more time than I have. After all I have to spend all my time making videos for you guys. So my plan was to use my truck, not this one, my other truck Billy Bob and my new gooseneck trailer that I'm still in the process of building to take my road test. That's definitely a viable option however the downside is that I will have a restricted CDL so I won't be able to drive semi trucks and I won't be able to drive anything with air brakes. So I would like to make an appeal to my viewers if there's anyone in the general New Hampshire area who has a class A CDL and who has a semi truck that you wouldn't mind me using to take my test I would be totally happy to pay for fuel and expenses. That would result in me getting a full unrestricted class A CDL which would let me drive almost anything which would be really nice for future content on this channel where I would like to get into having some larger equipment. If you are interested in helping me out send me a message on Instagram which is linked in the description below. So I am getting pretty close to registering this truck and getting it on the road so I'm really excited about that and also I have a cross-country road trip coming up later this year and I think I've decided that this is the truck I'm going to take with me on the trip. In order to get ready for that I have quite a bit of work to do to make sure it's going to be reliable comfortable and efficient so this should be a really exciting project. As for the HTP here this thing did a great job I'm really happy with how this thing worked on aluminum and I think that's going to be my new go-to machine for aluminum. Although it is worth noting it also works for steel and pretty much everything else as well so it'll be fun to try out those. Thank you so much for watching and we will catch you in the next one!