F450 Fiver Bed - Will This Fit A TC?
Hi all, I've been considering a TC for sometime now and I've decided to pull the trigger if one will work with my current truck. I have a 2004 F450 4WD with a Fontaine Classic Hauler Bed designed for ...
Forum Discussion
Quotes combined from two different posts:"
I don't think the OP will have "money left over", nor do I think swapping beds to a regular pickup bed will be cheap, or simple, nor do I think the OP made anyone happy paying only 8K for the bed that he has. He got a heck of a bargain for 8k. Here are a few reasons that come to mind off the top of my head, in no particular order...
- The 5ver hitch platform that is the foundation of the truck bed is 1" thick steel plate. It is actually two 1/2" pieces of plate sandwiched together, so the welders could handle the materials better on the frame jig. The are covered by these plates is are wide and long... I forget the exact dimensions, but in the neighborhood of 40 something by maybe 40 something inches rectangular. I would have to research my records to be more exact. The intention was to distribute the fiver pin weight over a broad area fore and aft along the frame's longitudinal axis.
- This fifth wheeL towing foundation hidden in the OP's bed was, by far, the most robust foundation platform for a 5th wheel hitch ever offered before or since in ANY light or medium duty Ford ship through production truck... with only one exception: The F-650 SuperCrewzer, which was welded on the same jigs by the same welders in the same plant on the same property adjacent to Ford's Kentucky Truck Plant.
- In addition to coming with the Super 5th 25.5K hitch by PullRite, which was selected over the Reese 30K hitch that didn't pass Fontaine's and Ford's testing at 30K, so that hitch had to be derated to 22K for the F650 SuperCrewzer, which Ford had more control over), the OP's Classic Traveler bed also came with a hidden gooseneck hitch under the PullRite low profile pyramid base.
- That gooseneck hitch bolts to the twin sandwiched 1/2" plates that makes up the 1" foundation for the bed.
- The tub itself is heavy gauge (I want to say 10 or 12, but it's been over a decade, so I'd have to look up files that are buried in storage somewhere) corrugated, galvanized decking. There is nothing structural about that bed that is made of fiberglass. The fiberglass sides are for smooth looks and aerodynamics, nothing more. There is a very solid tub of a bed inside that Classic Traveler. Much more to that bed than meets the eye.
- The lower side rail height was on purpose... so as to avoid the problem of bed rail crunch when articulating over drainage gulleys and driveways. It automatically adds another 6" of rail to fiver clearance on top of the 6" that would otherwise be there on a regular pickup bed.
- As the OP stated, the 8K he paid not only included all the of heavy steel I cited above, as well as both gooseneck and 5th wheel hitches, it also included air suspension. Not air bag supplementary helpers, but FULL air ride replacement suspension. And not just ANY air suspension system, but the most sophisticated parallelogram air suspension available. The dual parallelogram trailing arms maintain the driveline pinion angle throughout the suspension's full operational amplitude... 3" down, 3" up. The suspension system has it's own subframe that sister's the trucks frame rails. It also consists of an axle cradle that cleverly avoided the risks of weakening the axle housing from welding a panhard arm anchor onto the rear axle. The air suspension system by itself was $3,000, and included the air compressor, tank, and control system.
- As a 2004 model, the air suspension might have been from a different vendor, which means that it may have had most of, but not all of the characteristics described above. 2004 saw a change in rear air suspension vendors, because the previous system was so over built, the company lost money making it. Furthermore, Fontaine had an exclusive contract for the system, so the manufacturer couldn't sell it to anyone else. So the only solution was to discontinue it. Often times when something is no longer made, it is because it was made too well for the price it was being offered at. Such was the case here. To the OP... the two different parallelogram air suspension systems are from either ReycoGranning (the discontinued one) or LinkAirRide (still being made, but no longer with the supporting subframe that yours likely has, if you don't have the ReycoGranning).
- If you do have the ReycoGranning, the aircompressor and control module are integrated with the suspension subframe itself, on the driver's frame rail, just ahead of the forward rear parallel trailing arm anchor points. This compressor module might potentially interfere with a pickup bed. It will not interfere with a flat bed. Like I said, only maybe on a pickup bed. But even if the compressor module does interfere with the pick up bed, that is the least of your worries, because
- Unlike the 2008-2015 F450 pickups, the 2004 F-450 Fontaine Classic Traveler is a true F-450 Chassis Cab, which has narrow straight frame rails that are 34" apart. On the other hand, a pickup truck has wide, undulating frame rails that are 37" apart. All the suggestions about picking up a take off pickup bed "cheaply" are not taking into consideration the fabrication that is going to have take place to get that pickup bed to mount on your chassis cab frame rails. It will NOT "bolt up". There are companies that do this very thing, like Roll A Long, and Manning, and you guessed it... they charge money. You could hire a private welder to get it done, but now you are into the realm of backyard engineering a bed mounting system that will hold up to the duties of truck camper support, and still won't hold a candle to all the metal you threw away by ditching your Classic Traveler bed.
- Not only will you have to come up with a way to mount the pickup bed, you will also have to deal with the "GAP". Another difference between the F-450 chassis cab and any long bed pick up is the cab to axle distance. In a chassis cab, it is 60". In a pickup, it is only 56". So for your truck to look half way decent, and not like a frankentruck, you will either have to purchase a contoured fiberglass spacer (Roll A Long uses them for their conversions), and have the blended into your bargain take off bed, or, you will have to remove the dually fenders from your donor bed, trim the sheet metal formerly hidden by the fenders, so that you can remount the fenders to center over your rear tires. No matter which way you do it, it will cost money in fabrication, corrosion control after making any cuts, and paint and finishwork. It isn't a simple matter of finding a bed and bolting it on.
- We haven't even scratched the surface of yet another issue. Fuel tanks. Part of the OP's $8K bargain also included a secondary 34 gallon midship fuel tank mounted under the bed between the frame rails. The tank system includes a transfer pump, balancing valves, and a computer to run it, called a TrAX UFS by Transfer Flow. This system by itself costs almost $2,000 today. It will present another issue when it comes to retrofitting a pickup bed, because you have two tanks, and the pick up has only one fuel door. That door will work for the midship fuel tank, but more body work will be needed to make a second fuel door for the aft axle tank. But there really isn't room aft of the dually fender. So that means more glass work to, because the hole for the aft axle fuel tank will have to go through both the outer skin of the bed steel and the fiberglass... and then you'll need to bolster the fender fiberglass with enough steel bracketry to handle a thousand cycles of opening and closing the fuel door, and holding the weight of a diesel pump handle at the filling station.
- I forgot to mention that if you choose not to go with the 4" bed spacer, and move the bed ahead, trimming the sheet metal and scooching the dually fenders backwards, you might have to trim 4 inches of of the end of the frame. There is 4 inches you can trim, but that four inches is how the Fontaine mounted the rear receiver hitch... another value add to the original cost of the bed. And instead of drilling through the bottom flange of the frame, Fontaine used side brackets with horizontal bolts passing through the web of the frame and the side plates of the hitch. Reese had to punch the holes in their hitches special just to meet this requirement by Fontaine. It is a much more robust mounting system, in my opinion.
- Now, as nice as the Fontaine bed is... who is the OP going to sell it to? It will not work on any pickup, because of the cab axle distance difference of 4", and the frame width distance difference of 3", and the frame of the pickup has an axle kickup that the straight rail chassis cabs, for which the Fontaine was exclusively designed, do not have. So the OP's market to sell his bed just got reduced by 90% (SWAG). Now, he'll have to wait for that one chassis cab owner who needs a bed? When anyone can get a new steel 60" CA flat bed for $1,400... and a used one for $600 to $800? How can the OP compete with that? Sexy bed lines? True. Just getting committee think at Ford to agree on using the F150 taillights (very sexy on that truck, I think) probably cleared an entire shelf of hearburn medication for the grief involved. The same people would NOT approve the use of Mustang taillights on the SuperCrewzer, because "car lights cannot be on a truck". Sheesh. Anyway, there might be someone out there who would appreciate that bed, but as you can begin to tell, I'm probably one of the very few people who know enough about it to actually see it's worth, and I already have a bed that was equally under appreciated, too costly to build, and was discontinued before the Classic Traveler.
- The current bed will not easily become absolutely flat, because the PullRite Super 5th mounting system uses four 3/4" J pins to permit the hitch base to be removed. The issue then becomes the wide plates that eyelets for the J pins are welded to. You can unbolt those plates (I think the nuts are captive under the bed by weldment, or the 1" base itself was tapped, but I forget. If you really need to know, I have a few photos from production on that jig and I can try to find out, but it might take me a few weeks to locate them. You can leave the above PullRite J pin plates in place, and use 1" plywood subflooring to create an even plane that the camper can rest on top of.
- The forward tool box containing the spare tire will have to go of course.
- The suggestion made earlier about cutting the rear of the bed (use the vertical seam lines as a guide) and refabricating the cutaway piece into a reinstallable "tailgate" was a good suggestion I thought.
- If you remove the bed, but want to keep the rest of the great features that came with the price of the bed (three types of hitches, full air ride parallelogram arm suspension, underbed midship fuel tank, air compressor, air tank, and maybe even that 1" foundation.... then I would recommend a flat bed. Fontaine made an aluminum flat bed version of the same truck with the same accessories and equipment just described. Such a flat bed could have both an under bed box saddle mounted between the cab and rear wheels on both sides, as well as low profile shallow over bed boxes that would partially fill the gap between the truck camper and the bed deck, and still be low enough for your fifth wheel clearance.
- I don't see any well executed option that is cheap. I don't see coming out any dollars ahead. I don't even see breaking even. And I think the OP realizes all of the foregoing, because he has the bed right there in front of him and can crawl around and see everything that I'm talking about. And that is probably why selling the truck in its current, completed, unmolested, and very useful form for someone who only intends to tow a 5ver, is a strong option on the table.
- The OP's truck is also a 6.0... an EARLY 6.0 at that... and as a 4x4, has a 70 ft turning radius versus the much more maneuverable 56 ft turning radius for the same crew cab 60" CA 176" wheelbase and 4x4 drivetrain of F450's built just one year later, due to the changeover to a wide track Super 60 front axle and coil springs held by long radius arms which doubled the wheel cut angle. For these two reasons alone, I don't blame the OP for considering an entirely different truck altogether.
- However, there was no other "super pickup" bed ever built before or since the Fontaine Classic Traveler that was better suited for towing 5th wheel travel trailers. It was a heck of a package. Robustly built. Good looking. Low profile. I can't blame the OP for wanting to keep it!
bka0721 wrote:"
$8k for that Fiberglass bed? You certainly made someone very happy paying that. My service body only cost me $8,040.... Seems like you would come out with nothing out of your pocket, by selling the current bed, use the proceeds with purchasing a replacement bed that will work with both a truck camper and 5th Wheel, with money left over. b
I don't think the OP will have "money left over", nor do I think swapping beds to a regular pickup bed will be cheap, or simple, nor do I think the OP made anyone happy paying only 8K for the bed that he has. He got a heck of a bargain for 8k. Here are a few reasons that come to mind off the top of my head, in no particular order...
- The 5ver hitch platform that is the foundation of the truck bed is 1" thick steel plate. It is actually two 1/2" pieces of plate sandwiched together, so the welders could handle the materials better on the frame jig. The are covered by these plates is are wide and long... I forget the exact dimensions, but in the neighborhood of 40 something by maybe 40 something inches rectangular. I would have to research my records to be more exact. The intention was to distribute the fiver pin weight over a broad area fore and aft along the frame's longitudinal axis.
- This fifth wheeL towing foundation hidden in the OP's bed was, by far, the most robust foundation platform for a 5th wheel hitch ever offered before or since in ANY light or medium duty Ford ship through production truck... with only one exception: The F-650 SuperCrewzer, which was welded on the same jigs by the same welders in the same plant on the same property adjacent to Ford's Kentucky Truck Plant.
- In addition to coming with the Super 5th 25.5K hitch by PullRite, which was selected over the Reese 30K hitch that didn't pass Fontaine's and Ford's testing at 30K, so that hitch had to be derated to 22K for the F650 SuperCrewzer, which Ford had more control over), the OP's Classic Traveler bed also came with a hidden gooseneck hitch under the PullRite low profile pyramid base.
- That gooseneck hitch bolts to the twin sandwiched 1/2" plates that makes up the 1" foundation for the bed.
- The tub itself is heavy gauge (I want to say 10 or 12, but it's been over a decade, so I'd have to look up files that are buried in storage somewhere) corrugated, galvanized decking. There is nothing structural about that bed that is made of fiberglass. The fiberglass sides are for smooth looks and aerodynamics, nothing more. There is a very solid tub of a bed inside that Classic Traveler. Much more to that bed than meets the eye.
- The lower side rail height was on purpose... so as to avoid the problem of bed rail crunch when articulating over drainage gulleys and driveways. It automatically adds another 6" of rail to fiver clearance on top of the 6" that would otherwise be there on a regular pickup bed.
- As the OP stated, the 8K he paid not only included all the of heavy steel I cited above, as well as both gooseneck and 5th wheel hitches, it also included air suspension. Not air bag supplementary helpers, but FULL air ride replacement suspension. And not just ANY air suspension system, but the most sophisticated parallelogram air suspension available. The dual parallelogram trailing arms maintain the driveline pinion angle throughout the suspension's full operational amplitude... 3" down, 3" up. The suspension system has it's own subframe that sister's the trucks frame rails. It also consists of an axle cradle that cleverly avoided the risks of weakening the axle housing from welding a panhard arm anchor onto the rear axle. The air suspension system by itself was $3,000, and included the air compressor, tank, and control system.
- As a 2004 model, the air suspension might have been from a different vendor, which means that it may have had most of, but not all of the characteristics described above. 2004 saw a change in rear air suspension vendors, because the previous system was so over built, the company lost money making it. Furthermore, Fontaine had an exclusive contract for the system, so the manufacturer couldn't sell it to anyone else. So the only solution was to discontinue it. Often times when something is no longer made, it is because it was made too well for the price it was being offered at. Such was the case here. To the OP... the two different parallelogram air suspension systems are from either ReycoGranning (the discontinued one) or LinkAirRide (still being made, but no longer with the supporting subframe that yours likely has, if you don't have the ReycoGranning).
- If you do have the ReycoGranning, the aircompressor and control module are integrated with the suspension subframe itself, on the driver's frame rail, just ahead of the forward rear parallel trailing arm anchor points. This compressor module might potentially interfere with a pickup bed. It will not interfere with a flat bed. Like I said, only maybe on a pickup bed. But even if the compressor module does interfere with the pick up bed, that is the least of your worries, because
- Unlike the 2008-2015 F450 pickups, the 2004 F-450 Fontaine Classic Traveler is a true F-450 Chassis Cab, which has narrow straight frame rails that are 34" apart. On the other hand, a pickup truck has wide, undulating frame rails that are 37" apart. All the suggestions about picking up a take off pickup bed "cheaply" are not taking into consideration the fabrication that is going to have take place to get that pickup bed to mount on your chassis cab frame rails. It will NOT "bolt up". There are companies that do this very thing, like Roll A Long, and Manning, and you guessed it... they charge money. You could hire a private welder to get it done, but now you are into the realm of backyard engineering a bed mounting system that will hold up to the duties of truck camper support, and still won't hold a candle to all the metal you threw away by ditching your Classic Traveler bed.
- Not only will you have to come up with a way to mount the pickup bed, you will also have to deal with the "GAP". Another difference between the F-450 chassis cab and any long bed pick up is the cab to axle distance. In a chassis cab, it is 60". In a pickup, it is only 56". So for your truck to look half way decent, and not like a frankentruck, you will either have to purchase a contoured fiberglass spacer (Roll A Long uses them for their conversions), and have the blended into your bargain take off bed, or, you will have to remove the dually fenders from your donor bed, trim the sheet metal formerly hidden by the fenders, so that you can remount the fenders to center over your rear tires. No matter which way you do it, it will cost money in fabrication, corrosion control after making any cuts, and paint and finishwork. It isn't a simple matter of finding a bed and bolting it on.
- We haven't even scratched the surface of yet another issue. Fuel tanks. Part of the OP's $8K bargain also included a secondary 34 gallon midship fuel tank mounted under the bed between the frame rails. The tank system includes a transfer pump, balancing valves, and a computer to run it, called a TrAX UFS by Transfer Flow. This system by itself costs almost $2,000 today. It will present another issue when it comes to retrofitting a pickup bed, because you have two tanks, and the pick up has only one fuel door. That door will work for the midship fuel tank, but more body work will be needed to make a second fuel door for the aft axle tank. But there really isn't room aft of the dually fender. So that means more glass work to, because the hole for the aft axle fuel tank will have to go through both the outer skin of the bed steel and the fiberglass... and then you'll need to bolster the fender fiberglass with enough steel bracketry to handle a thousand cycles of opening and closing the fuel door, and holding the weight of a diesel pump handle at the filling station.
- I forgot to mention that if you choose not to go with the 4" bed spacer, and move the bed ahead, trimming the sheet metal and scooching the dually fenders backwards, you might have to trim 4 inches of of the end of the frame. There is 4 inches you can trim, but that four inches is how the Fontaine mounted the rear receiver hitch... another value add to the original cost of the bed. And instead of drilling through the bottom flange of the frame, Fontaine used side brackets with horizontal bolts passing through the web of the frame and the side plates of the hitch. Reese had to punch the holes in their hitches special just to meet this requirement by Fontaine. It is a much more robust mounting system, in my opinion.
- Now, as nice as the Fontaine bed is... who is the OP going to sell it to? It will not work on any pickup, because of the cab axle distance difference of 4", and the frame width distance difference of 3", and the frame of the pickup has an axle kickup that the straight rail chassis cabs, for which the Fontaine was exclusively designed, do not have. So the OP's market to sell his bed just got reduced by 90% (SWAG). Now, he'll have to wait for that one chassis cab owner who needs a bed? When anyone can get a new steel 60" CA flat bed for $1,400... and a used one for $600 to $800? How can the OP compete with that? Sexy bed lines? True. Just getting committee think at Ford to agree on using the F150 taillights (very sexy on that truck, I think) probably cleared an entire shelf of hearburn medication for the grief involved. The same people would NOT approve the use of Mustang taillights on the SuperCrewzer, because "car lights cannot be on a truck". Sheesh. Anyway, there might be someone out there who would appreciate that bed, but as you can begin to tell, I'm probably one of the very few people who know enough about it to actually see it's worth, and I already have a bed that was equally under appreciated, too costly to build, and was discontinued before the Classic Traveler.
- The current bed will not easily become absolutely flat, because the PullRite Super 5th mounting system uses four 3/4" J pins to permit the hitch base to be removed. The issue then becomes the wide plates that eyelets for the J pins are welded to. You can unbolt those plates (I think the nuts are captive under the bed by weldment, or the 1" base itself was tapped, but I forget. If you really need to know, I have a few photos from production on that jig and I can try to find out, but it might take me a few weeks to locate them. You can leave the above PullRite J pin plates in place, and use 1" plywood subflooring to create an even plane that the camper can rest on top of.
- The forward tool box containing the spare tire will have to go of course.
- The suggestion made earlier about cutting the rear of the bed (use the vertical seam lines as a guide) and refabricating the cutaway piece into a reinstallable "tailgate" was a good suggestion I thought.
- If you remove the bed, but want to keep the rest of the great features that came with the price of the bed (three types of hitches, full air ride parallelogram arm suspension, underbed midship fuel tank, air compressor, air tank, and maybe even that 1" foundation.... then I would recommend a flat bed. Fontaine made an aluminum flat bed version of the same truck with the same accessories and equipment just described. Such a flat bed could have both an under bed box saddle mounted between the cab and rear wheels on both sides, as well as low profile shallow over bed boxes that would partially fill the gap between the truck camper and the bed deck, and still be low enough for your fifth wheel clearance.
- I don't see any well executed option that is cheap. I don't see coming out any dollars ahead. I don't even see breaking even. And I think the OP realizes all of the foregoing, because he has the bed right there in front of him and can crawl around and see everything that I'm talking about. And that is probably why selling the truck in its current, completed, unmolested, and very useful form for someone who only intends to tow a 5ver, is a strong option on the table.
- The OP's truck is also a 6.0... an EARLY 6.0 at that... and as a 4x4, has a 70 ft turning radius versus the much more maneuverable 56 ft turning radius for the same crew cab 60" CA 176" wheelbase and 4x4 drivetrain of F450's built just one year later, due to the changeover to a wide track Super 60 front axle and coil springs held by long radius arms which doubled the wheel cut angle. For these two reasons alone, I don't blame the OP for considering an entirely different truck altogether.
- However, there was no other "super pickup" bed ever built before or since the Fontaine Classic Traveler that was better suited for towing 5th wheel travel trailers. It was a heck of a package. Robustly built. Good looking. Low profile. I can't blame the OP for wanting to keep it!
