It's taking me way too much time to work around the stock bed.  A few minutes with the saber saw and I've got much more working room.

At some point in history a whole bunch of 1/8-inch sheetmetal was welded to the back of the bed around the tailgate opening.  It took a lot of time to carefully grind the welds out so the bedsides weren't damaged, but I finally got the rear of the truck back down to the factory metal.

Once to metal it was only a few minutes of removing bolts and sawing the center of the spars and bed ends to releive the back of the truck from its heavy bed.

Another few minutes and I had cleaned up most everything but the bedside sheetmetal.  There's still a bunch of extra metal on the sides, but I'll take that off a little later.

For now there's about 120-lbs less weight on the back, which is helpful because I'll easily add that much in tubing.  *** I'll add that with the spare.

With nothing in the way the tubing work should go a lot faster.  I only had time to start the triangulation.  You'll see a whole bunch more tubing work coming up.  My steel supplier just dropped off a few sticks of 1-3/4 0.095 DOM. They didn't have 0.083 anymore and 0.065 is a little spindly for the bracing.  The major structural elements will still be 0.120-wall, but why put on the weight if you don't need to?