Up next New parts counter | The Right Hardware for Your Hauler Published on November 20, 2020 Author Mike Alexander Tags bagged, bed wood, bedwood, Dakota Digital, F-100, f100, f100 builders guide, ford, H2X two-stage system, street trucks, Share article Facebook 0 Twitter 0 Mail 0 F100 BedWood Install Step By Step | BedWood and Parts Helps Us Update an Old Ford Bed! BedWood Helps Us Update an Old Ford Bed Choosing the perfect bed floor finish for your build isn’t always the easiest thing to do. Of course, you can find red oak or pine just about anywhere, but to really set your truck apart, you need to think of what the bed really is. It is the largest flat surface on the entire truck and, with the right product, can easily be transformed into the main focal point of the truck. By choosing the correct species of bed wood from the BedWood experts, you can tie in little accents throughout your build and give your truck the contrast and detail it deserves. All of the wood from BedWood and Parts is FAS, which is the highest grade of hardwood lumber that you can source. It possesses a minimum of 83% clear face. But the company takes that a step further by providing you a bed wood set that has 100% clear face. By hand-selecting each wood species, the experts there ensure a lack of flaws and make sure that the grain patterns will match throughout the bed of the truck. All BedWood wood is kiln dried so that it stabilizes with around a 6-8% moisture content. After it is shaped, planks are properly sealed with BedWood’s coatings, ensuring the wood will be dimensionally stable and won’t move, shrink or expand. The single most important thing when it comes to the longevity of BedWood’s wood is the proper sealing of the wood itself—sealing all of the wood, including the ends, edges, top, bottom, and inside any drilled holes. The exclusive pre-finished options use a premium H2X two-stage system. The first stage is an impregnator, which consists of a proprietary blend of biocides, fungicides and mildewcides, as well as an adhesion promoter. In other words, it’s going to protect the wood from the inside out. Then the second stage is multiple coats of topcoat clear finish, providing you exceptional protection and an amazing appearance. The BedWood machines do a lot of the hard work, with each plank sent down the automatic finish line to get the final topcoats of clear. After the final coat is properly dried, the kit is boxed up and shipped out to the customer. This particular ’61 F-100 Unibody is a full-frame swap with a ’04 Mercury Grand Marquis. So, the bed already had a raised floor with a raised access built into the center, but up until now it was just manually operated by pulling on a rope attachment. You can’t be doing it like that with this stunning BedWood kit, so we installed a set of Dakota Digital LACT-10, which are 10-inch linear actuators for an access panel at the touch of a button, which definitely adds to the overall look and function of the bed wood install. When you log onto www.bedwoodandparts.com and scroll down to the visualizer, you can choose the truck color (black), choose a wood species and see how the different combinations will look. As mentioned, each piece is hand selected per kit, and then machined to exacting measurements for best fit and finish as each kit is hand-built to size specs. Some hand finishing finalizes the pieces prior to finishing options. Here’s a look once the first step of finishing has been completed. The top clearcoat being applied by machine for a perfect uniform finish every time. Here’s a “before” photo of the sad and boring bed floor before we got started on the upgrade. Using the Dakota Digital linear actuators and controller, we built a center cage that would lift for access to vital components below. Test fitting the BedWood kit prior to finalizing the center rails. We specified the strips to be a bit long so that we could cut them down to the needed length. Final test fit before bolting everything down with hidden hardware. The center section made it nice and easy to secure the bed wood down with easy access. Here’s a “before” photo of the sad and boring bed floor before we got started on the upgrade. All buttoned up! It has made a world of a difference in our old shop truck—night and day from the “before” shots!