The mother of this invention is my hatred of shoveling aggregate out of my pickup truck. I built a shallow wooden box that keeps the stone in one place when I drive, and dumps it exactly where I want it when I get to the site.
The dump-bed box fits between the truck’s wheel wells, where it rests on two or three lengths of 3/4-in. pipe. When the dump-bed is empty, I block it up with a couple of 2x4s to keep it from rolling around while I’m driving. Before loading I pull out the blocks and make sure that the pipes are oriented as shown in the drawing. This dump-bed holds about a half-yard, and the loader operators I’ve worked with so far have been able to fill it without spilling a granule.
To unload, I drop the tailgate all the way down, back the truck up to the dump point and hit the brakes. The dump-bed rolls back, coming to rest with one end on the ground and the other on the back of the truck. I just pull out the end piece, and the rest of the aggregate can be pushed out of the dumper.
—Al Dorsa, Christiansted, None
Edited and illustrated by Charles Miller
From Fine Homebuilding #16
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I'd call this a Rube Goldberg except that Ruben would never devised something this ridiculous. Just imagine loading gravel into that box without spilling into the pickup bed itself. My advice: Install a hitch on your pickup and buy a trailer - some even have a dumping mechanism.
Actually the tip is good for something: A few laughs at the extremes people will go to in convincing themselves that a pickup is actually a truck.