Most of the flatbed builds I see for Yotas are for hardcore off roading-I need a bed for hauling firewood and other junk around, but I also use the truck for camping, hunting, etc... About two years ago I picked up a bunch of oddball lengths and shapes of steel from a company that was moving, but in that lot I got two 10' long pieces of 3 x 3 x 5/16" angle and 16' of 6 x 2 x 1/4" rectangular tubing. I also got some other sizes of angle and channel that I'll use for the mounts and to mount the wood planks to. The bed will be about 7' 6" which is kind of long, but it will be mounted up high so I shouldn't have any departure angle problems. I'm going to make it 63" wide which is basically as wide as the widest part of the cab so that I have as large a bed as possible:



I'm going keep the spare right behind the cab old school style-that way it's up out of the muck and easy to get to. Plus I'll still be able to carry 4 x 8 sheets of plywood to the right of the spare mount (4' 2" to the edge of the bed). I'll also be cutting in stake pockets so that I can put 24" tall stake sides on the sides and rear. I should be able to carry a decent heaped load of wood that way.



The bed itself with all of the steel, 3/4" oak decking, and the spare tire (265/75/16 Treadwright Guard Dog on a 16x7 Tundra steel wheel) should come in at just over 500lbs which from what I've seen is about 200lbs heavier than stock, but I have 200lb ZUK springs on my rearend that can handle quite a bit of weight. I'm hopefully going to be making a deal on some 5.29s I found on Craigslist later this week so those will help get the load moving. I'm going to make my own mounts out of UHMW polyethylene-I see that's what 4Crawler uses for their body lift kits so it should work well. Eventually I'll add a backrack because I need a place to mount my high lift and some other stuff, but I just want to get the basic bed built for now. Hopefully will be starting on it soon.

 

Subscribed! I was just pondering something like this...well not a lot like this, but same philosophy. Good luck with the build!

 

I would add more cross members if its going to be used for work. Although I'm not a fan of using wood for a flatbed deck, it will bow if you don't support it enough.