I've moved on from garage improvements to fixing my truck. Turns out the 99-04 Silverado/Sierra 1500 and 2500 8' bed rear frame sections are extremely similar but not quite identical - I have a 2500, and a "new" 1500 rear frame to put on it. The main difference is that where it meets the forward section of frame, the 1500 frame is 6" tall, the 2500 frame is 8", but both taper down to 5". Gonna end up doing some fabricating to make it fit, should be far stronger then the rusty pile of crap I have right now. The weird part is, the 6.5' bed frames are identical, according to the GM parts lookup.
But, at this point I'm essential and work has picked back up, so not nearly as many hours in the day to work on such things. Today after work I managed to remove an exhaust clamp and one nut on a flange - the other one rounded off. Tomorrow I gotta see if I can split it and get the back half of the exhaust off.
