Truck Bed Swing Out Step Installation on a 2003 Ford F-150

Installation of a Truck Bed Swing Out Step on a 2003 Ford F-150

Today on this 2003 Ford F-150 we are going to install part number AS-550 from Bully Truck Accessories. This part gets mounted behind the cab of the vehicle so it gives you a step to easily reach into the bed of the truck. This kit will fit a variety of vehicles, but today we are just going to do the steps that are involved for our pickup. :19

We are going to do some sub assembly first. We are going to take our step, where we are going to put our foot on and attach it to our bracket right here. We are going to align this hole with this slot. Then we are going to take our 2 inch bolt here and install it with a flat washer. We are going to out our other flat washer and hex nut behind that. We are going to get it really finger tight. Next we are going to go ahead and work on this part here. This part actually gets bolted to the bed rail that goes across the truck. We will take this jack screw and just get it threaded in for now. :54

What happens is this part is going to rest against the bottom edge of the rail, because the rail is going to be a little bit irregular, so it has to match the curve of the rail. So, we are going to thread that on through. Then on the backside, we are going to install another nut. That is just going to be a lock nut, we are going to leave that loose, because once we thread that up it is going to be locked in position. I will show you how this goes together before we put it on the truck. Make sure you have this part of the jack screw pointing up. What we are going to do with this assembly is put it under the bed of the truck, put it up against the cross rail we are going to use, and we are going to mark our hole to drill out. Before we get started we are going to show you how this jack screw fits. As you can see it will sit on the bottom of the cross rail here, but we have a little bit of space so we will adjust that jack screw to fit up in there. Now take the whole assembly and hold it up there, you want to make sure you keep it away from the body panel by a 1/4 of an inch or so, and then we will mark our hole. We are going to use a paint marker to do that with. 1:50

We will start off with a 1/4 inch pilot bit first, and then we will go to the 1/2 inch. Next we will start with the hardware that gets installed inside here. Basically what is going to happen is we are going to install this screw from the other side, because we want the recessed section to be facing down. We are going to run this all the way through and make it tight. We will tighten this down with a wrench, and then what is going to happen is that it is going to get installed from the inside. Now we can take our step, push it into place and install our flat washer and nut. Then we will run our jack screw up to the bottom of the bed. When we have it basically where we want it we will go ahead and tighten this bolt down first, and then we will go to our jack screw. Instead of a slot in the bottom here you can take a screw driver to it. Go ahead and tighten it up once you have it the way you want it. Then we will take our jam nut here, and tighten it down. The last thing we need to adjust is the step right here, we can put it at the height we want and tighten it down too. 3:01

A quick shake test, looks like its solid. Lets go ahead and try it out, put some weight on it and we will check the operation. Pull out this lever and push it to the front and it locks into position. In this position we can use it to step on, and you can put it to the back too. It is spring loaded so it locks back into the notch everytime. In a short time we have our step installed. There you have it for part number AS-550 from Bully Truck Accessories.