I recently bought a '61 Ford uni body short bed pickup. The passenger side door has had the factory latch removed and it was replaced with a sliding hardware store style latch. The bottom of the frame was also reinforced with a 1" diameter rebar truss down both sides of the frame. I was talking about it with a few people the other day, and an older man told me that it was common for people to become trapped inside the cab of uni body pickups when the bed was loaded down, and that was probably the reason for the modifications. Has anyone else ever heard of that?
sounds like a hack job repair, but yes the unibodies were prone to sagging in that area,,i believe that was part of the reason they were only manufactured for three years,,
The unibody pickups were bad about the doors binding when the bed were loaded and the body would flex. Thats the primary reason that ford discontinued the model and went back to the separate bed/cab design.
I heard on the news that Joe Biden was once trapped in the bed of his cousins pickup when the handle broke.He said it scarred him for life being trapped back there for 3 hours with people just walking by not offering to help.
No I've owned a couple but never heard of anyone getting trapped from over loading the bed. I would be all about finding out why they beefed the frame with rebar. Those had a pretty substantial chassis as I recall.
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