Creating Tie Downs for the Ramp Truck

Update by Tim Suddard to the Ford F-350 Ramp Truck project car
Mar 16, 2016

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If you do this type of work and don’t have a plasma cutter, you are doing things the hard way.

First, we made a template, and measured and marked were we wanted to mount our tie downs.

A hole in the truck’s 1/8-inch plate took less then a minute to cut. From here we could drill bolt holes and quickly finish our tie down mounting system.

Strong, cheap and simple. Angle iron welded to the side of our truck’s bed made for a great alternate tie down system.

Oddly enough when we bought our ramp truck, it had no tie down hooks. The previous owner had apparently only held cars down with the winch and a strap from the back of the car to the tail of the truck.

We wanted some real tie downs, not only for cars, but also for stuff like car parts or lumber, should we decide to use the truck to carry such items.

For car tie downs, we found the right pieces at Northern Tool. We picked up eight of them for just a few dollars each. We chose eight as we wanted to be able to secure cars of various sizes. We mounted four in the back and four in the front in both inboard and outboard locations.

With our Eastwood plasma cutter, mounting these tie downs was quick and easy. We just traced the hole we would need in the truck’s deck that we would need install each tie down, and quickly got all eight pieces mounted.

To hold down any future parts and lumber of unknown siza and shape, we ran lengths of 1.5” angle iron down both sides of the truck. We drilled holes every 12” and welded this angle iron to the side of the truck‘s bed.

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