Machinebuilder said:
NIce, similar to my plan.
I've got a 2021 F350 coming and want to put my Granby on a flatbed.
Are you satisfied with the CM bed?
Thanks, Machinebuilder. I looked at a lot of truck bed manufacturers and thought about custom building one, and in the end settled on the aluminum CM for a few reasons. They are an excellent build; the construction is both lightweight aluminum and reinforced with steel in the critical spots where it attaches to the truck's steel frame. There's a lot of attention to detail, and TIG welding is remarkable for a mass-produced flatbed. The deck paneling I went with was a rugged, reinforced, ribbed aluminum vs wood slat.They have a good selection of models and configurations, and you are bound to find one that will fit your new F350 as if it was an OEM design. You can trick it out any way you want. There's a lot of flexibility.
I kept to the bare bones basics when buying the flatbed and fabricated my own aluminum side rails and boxes, both to keep the costs down, and to work as I had intended. The boxes that you can typically buy, as add-ons, are extremely expensive and wouldn't have worked as well for what I had in mind, so I could save some money there by configuring and building out my own. Since I was building a hybrid, that is, a Hawk slide-in shell vs Hawk flatbed model, onto an aluminum flatbed, I could take advantage of the valuable space on the outside of the shell, on the sides, that on a pickup body simply goes to waste. You can have a lot more exterior space with a flatbed with side rails/flip down gates, in the same foot print as a pickup. The prices of a CM depends on the flatbed model you want. Relatively speaking, it will probably run you about half the cost of a Norweld, which are very nice, but much more expensive, and no better built. And for my purposes the CM was better suited to the build I had in mind, anyway. There are other manufacturers who are also competitive with CM's prices and quality of build, for instance, Bradford Built, and others like ProTech who are semi custom and more expensive than CM but less expensive than Norweld. But in the end, there was a CM distributor, local to where I live, and so it was convenient for me to run over there and see what they had in stock, in their yard, and to sort out in person, what I had in mind. I liked what I saw when I got there and decided to go with a CM.
A basic CM model, like what I put on - the AL RD Aluminum Flat Deck Body - will probably cost around $4K+. You can find new aluminum flatbeds for $3K or perhaps even less, but at that price point I'd be a little concerned about the build quality, fit, or dodgy construction. Hope that helps.
Rich