[Today’s run: 4 miles]
My son recently received the gift of an old Ford Ranger pickup truck from his grandfather. It has been a one-owner vehicle for all of it’s 150+ thousand miles.
Recently he showed me a place where the bed of the truck was making a strange upward bulge. I first thought it was because the bed was rusting out. But then we looked closer at it later and I figured it out.
Here are two pictures looking at the leaf spring mounting points on the left (driver’s side) and the right. The pictures are not very clear but you can see some structure and bolts in the “left” picture. There is a spring hanger bolted to the frame then a shackle which connects the spring hanger to the spring.
The problem is that the right leaf spring has become detached from the usual frame connection. When he drives over the speed bumps in his housing development, or over any other big pothole, the spring hammers against the bottom of the truck bed. That has made a bulge in the truck bed.
The right springer hanger and shackle are completely gone and the spring is not attached to anything! You can see some darker rusty stuff, that is the remains of the spring hanger. The shackle is AWOL. The bolts and nuts are just rusty nubs.
I did some googling and discovered this is not a completely unusual problem. The spring hanger parts are of a lighter type of metal than the frame, so they rust away before the spring or the frame do.
Today we worked on getting the bumper off (which allowed me to take these straight-from-behind pictures) and started on removing the truck bed. We have 4 of the 6 bed bolts out, two of which are broken. When the bed is gone I should be able to get in there with a grinder and remove both the left and right spring hangers and put in new stuff. I may have to beef up the frame on the right side if it is too rusty. (And, you might notice in the “right” picture that the hanger for the exhaust pipe is also rusted gone…)