Cutting holes in a new truck is SCARY. But it needs to be done. One of the design requirements my wife and I had was being able to get between the cab and box without going outside. That means a big hole.
I started by striping the interior out of the back of the truck. This allowed access to the back wall and moving the headliner forward. Seats out, trim pieces out, seatbelts out, there are a lot of pieces in a new truck.
Once all that is out of the way, there is a lot of measuring this and that, thinking, staring at it, cutting holes cant be undone. We decided on a 3′ wide opening as tall as we could make it. Its offset to the drivers side a couple inches to allow a little more room for the passenger rear seat. Once the plan was finally in place, we drilled two holes in the bottom through both the truck and the box, this gave us the bottom corners. More measuring to make sure everything fit and its cutting time.
Starting from the box side I cut a big hole…. No going back now. A skill saw goes though the aluminum box easily. The floor not so much, its steel and really hard.
Once the hole was cut there it was on to the truck. I started by removing the window. I spent WAY too much time trying to get it out in one piece, I was doing great, it was loose all the way across the bottom and I only had about 8″ left to go on the top, when yeah it broke. Out comes the shop vac to clean up a lot of glass.
With the window out there was more thinking and tape measure work, and head scratching. Everything needs to line up on both sides. Get on with it, out comes the sawzall and I significantly drop the value of my new truck. But we have a hole! And it even lines up pretty damn well on both sides. The bottom lip will have to get attacked with different tools, its really hard and needs to get cut close to the floor.
Up next, closing up the big new hole.