60-66 Stepside rear step bumper modification

[murphy98]

Hello all,
by request of a fellow member, I am sharing my "lesson learned" story & posting some photos with text of the modifications I had to make to my rear step bumper, in order to fit my '62 stepside long bed truck.

In my defence, this is my first stepside truck, I've always owned long bed fleetside trucks. So not being very failure with them, I assumed (wrongly) that the additional length of the long bed was made up in front of the rear fenders, in the running board area. I did not realize (or look carefully enough) that there is also an extra 6" behind the rear fenders. If, like me, you've never really noticed, have a look at a short bed stepside truck. You can see the rear fenders are almost in contact with the rear stake pockets (tailgate end) Whereas there is about a 6" gap between the rear fenders & the rear stake pockets on a long bed truck. Lesson learned!! Don't even want to think about the 9 foot beds

Here's the story:
My truck came with a very poor homemade bumper which was quite bent out of shape and had to go. So I started searching for a new rear bumper. I've always preferred the look of a step bumper & when I saw internet photos of original diamond plate stepside bumpers which wrap around (as I call it) the rear fenders which some of these trucks came with, I was hooked! Had to have one! It was not easy to find one around here, but I finally tracked one down from a Classic truck parts supplier who also carries used parts & happen to have one sitting in a storage area (not mounted on a truck) He only wanted $50 for it so I figured, can't go wrong with that!...or could I??

Not knowing at the time that there was a difference between short bed & long bed step bumpers of this style (because of that extra 6" in rear of the long bed) I went ahead and stripped it, primed & painted it. I was so happy with look!..... until I mounted it on the truck & installed the fenders!

Note: Before I resorted to modifying this bumper I tried to find a correct one locally with no luck, and shipping one from the US where they seem to be more plentiful would have been too cost prohibitive.

So here below is the first installment (more to follow) of what I did to make my short bed step bumper fit my long bed correctly! All in all it was a fun metal fab/welding project to do and rather easy to accomplish with rather basic tools, welder, die grinder with cut off wheels, angle grinder & my trusty old jig saw with metal blades. If you have a plasma cutter (I don't) I would imagine you could make the cuts much faster too. I did have to buy 2 pieces of 1/8" diamond plate steel 12" x 24" from my local Metal Supermarket (really inexpensive) to make up two new step pieces. The other filler pieces were made with scraps I had sitting around. At the end of the day, I learned a little more about these great trucks and ended up with what I'm proud to say is a really cool looking bumper!

If any of you are in the same boat I was in (I doubt many of you would overlook the bed length dimension detail I did here) or if can only find a short bed step bumper of this style to put on your long step bed truck, hope this little project helps you out? Any questions, feel free to ask!