I have found a nice set of custom built sidesteps that were made for a longbed and intended for bolt on mounting, but my truck is a short bed and the tank is in the way for passing a drill or bolt through. Here's the dilema, I would simply like to weld on the bar plates to the sides of the frame. Any negatives to doing this? I have searched many of the old posts and in my own conclusions find that it is in fact O.K. to weld onto the frame. Anybody have a similar experience to this? TIA

Wood

 

as long as you don't weld on the flange of the frame you will be ok, but i personally would use self tapping bolts, you can drill thru the side of the frame without coming close to the tank.... the flange is 3 or 4 inches wide

 

I had the same problem with my long bed. What I did was to bolt (clamp) to the top and bottom of both sides of the fuel tank and run a flat bar across the bottom of the frame and a ??? vertical piece of 3/4" drilled and tapped to hold the bottom of the bracket for the running board. Solid as a rock. They use it to pickup the truck when it needs it. I don't remember what I used for a spacer for the offset but a 3" or 4 " what ever it is piece of tube steel 2"x3" vertical will bolt it solid to the frame. If I knew how to use the plugin stuff for the camera I would send you a picture of it. Would have to get girlfriend to do that for me. Does anyone else have problems with computors like me?

 

I had some welded on last summer on a 07, just disconnected both neg battery cables, don't see anything wrong with weld ons.

 

Ya, definitely disconnect the batteries before you weld.

Nick