I got home yesterday afternoon after driving my truck back from Fresno. I split the drive by staying overnight in Reno this time instead of one long push back to Boise. I flew down first thing Monday morning with Billy picking me up at the airport at 10:30 am. His shop is about 5 minutes from the airport.
Originally, I only had plans for a front and rear bumper for the truck. But I added a custom roof basket to the plans after dropping the truck off and seeing the baskets Billy does for Toyotas. The plan was to install the basket in a similar fashion to how he does baskets for his Toyotas. But late last Thursday night, he discovered that wasn't possible due to the design of the Chevy door frame and how the doors close on the frame. He didn't realize this till he had the basket built. See, he had to build the basket first to get the points for the mounts lined up with the doors. Kind of backwards maybe, but he'd never done this on a Chevy before. Anyway, this screwed up getting the basket powder coated with the bumpers on Friday. So in all the pictures you'll see that the basket isn't powder coated and that's why. Ultimately, Billy knocked some money off the price of the basket since he didn't get it powder coated and I'll do that here in Boise.
Over the weekend I researched other options to mount the basket so it wouldn't go to waste. Billy wasn't going to charge me for the basket if I couldn't use it. I could have just walked away from it, no harm, but I really wanted this basket. With the height clearance being an issue for me, the truck and our garage, doing a Yakima/Thule mounting system wouldn't work. I didn't have the clearance. In researching other mounting options, I learned it is possible to use wellnuts (or other similar nuts) to mount the basket where the factory rails would normally go. Billy was okay with this as he does it to Toyotas, but he was reluctant to do it to my truck without me standing there giving an "okay." So we waited till I got into town, looked things over and gave the "okay."
This means the basket is not quite finished as we ran out of time to put a windscreen on the front before I had to leave to make it to Reno at a reasonable hour. When he found out the basket wasn't going to mount as expected last Thursday, we both gave up on it. This made for a loud drive home.
I guess this is just the trial and tribulations of doing a custom job for the first time.
I'll start with some photos of the rear bumper construction first. This first picture shows the spindle mounts for the rear bumper's dual-swing out gates. Yes, I had to give up the steps in the rear bumper for this feature. No way around it. Those spindle mounts travel the height of the rear bumper and are welded into the inside of the bumper both at the bottom and top of the inside of the bumper. Just no way to keep the steps. With no swing out gates, I could have kept the steps. But I wanted to be able to take the spare tire out from under the truck and mount it somewhere accessible. The roof was out as I wouldn't fit in our garage. And the bed was out as I need the bed for storage and the bed covers for the bike racks. The only other option was a rear-gate spare tire mount.
You'll also notice I had to cut off the cladding there at the back end of the fenders. Billy then built a "plug" with sheet metal, had it powder coated like the bumpers and inserted those plugs into the cladding. Just need a bit of touch up paint on the rivet heads.
Also of note is the "wear plate" around the spindle mount that is screwed onto the bumper. This is a replaceable wear plate for those times when it gets so scratched up from use I can put a new one on. This way the bumper itself doesn't get scratched up from the gate's lock pin moving back and forth from opening and closing.
