Converting a Chevy C10 Long Bed to a Short Bed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um9r63QxV0c
Short bed Chevy C10 pickups are expensive and hard to find. Here’s how to shorten a long bed and “hack” the market!
Back in the old days of pickup trucks, long beds were by far the most popular configuration. Mostly because in that time period, we valued utility over looks. Today, the vast majority of pickups are crew cabs with tiny beds. And collectors tend to shy away from classic trucks like the Chevy C10 if they sport a long bed. The problem, of course, is that original short beds are expensive and hard to find.
Converting a long bed to a short bed isn’t exactly an easy job, either. But it’s nothing that scares the resourceful crew at Hot Rod Garage. These guys spend their days taking on all sorts of seemingly impossible projects. Just because they can. But in their latest episode, Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa convert a Chevy C10 to a short bed the “easy” way.
Even though no one would ever mistake this for an easy job, using a Brothers Trucks kit makes it a whole lot easier. And if you have mad skills like these guys, doing things this way will save you a ton of coin. But this is no job for the shadetree mechanic. For starters, you’ve got to unbolt the entire truck from the frame!
Using the $400 Brothers Trucks kit saves a whole bunch of time and headaches, however. It comes with a set of jigs that are premeasured and predrilled, so you don’t have to do all that guesswork yourself. As Angelo notes, doing it yourself is “way more tedious, and much harder to get exactly right.” It’s also worth noting that you don’t have to remove the cab to do the job, though they do so in this case to make things easier to see.
It might be hard work, but shortening this Chevy C10 is well worth it. Even with the price of the kit and new body parts factored in, Hot Rod Garage is able to add a QA1 complete suspension system and still come in at a price less than buying a short bed Chevy C10 in the first place. So if you’ve got the mechanical know how, maybe it’s time you “hacked” the Chevy C10 market!
