Review: aftermarket bed sides

[pdxhall]

Aftermarket sheet metal. There has been endless debate here on the forum since I became a member and I’m sure long before. Fitment, thickness and quality of the steel, and on and on. You know what I mean. When I first started building my truck, patch panels were scarce and most were of poor quality and/or fit. I was wrestling with them like everybody else. After taking a 3 year break to do the retirement thing traveling around the country, I was back to building the truck. I’ve bought a couple of fender patches and fender hardware and they have all been excellent. But that is not what I want to review.
I recently decided that both bed sides on Sanity are beyond reasonable repair. The time and effort wouldn’t be worth it. I started to look for replacements. Even if I did find them locally, there is still the cost of the sides and probably still some body work and if I found some that needed to be shipped the cost would be expensive.
I started looking at the new repo fleetside longbed bedsides that recently came out but for the price of the sides plus shipping it was still too expensive. I checked all of the online stores trying to find a deal and also to find any reviews. I finally found the deal I couldn’t pass up. All of the vendors prices are the same but the shipping is what sold me. One vendor quoted over $700 for shipping. LMC Truck has free freight shipping for orders over $1000. I took a huge risk and bought both new bed sides.
REVIEW: The parts arrived and the packing was excellent and the bed sides are flawless. I took measurements of every bolt hole, length, width, and height of everything I could think of and compared these to the original bed sides. Every measurement is exactly the same. The steel is the correct gauge. In my opinion they could pass as NOS they are so good. I would recommend these.