RPM TECH >> Preparing our work truck for work, we add a BedTred, Roll-X & BAKBox
TRICK OUT YOUR TRUCK ACCESSORI ZE
story and photos by
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George Pich
ost of us have trucks, or at the very least borrow a buddy’s or neighbor’s at some point to haul, load or tow. At RPM, we’re always looking for new ways to help Trick Out Your Truck by sharing toys, tips, and tricks we’ve done to spice up our haulers for power, performance, to be more user friendly, or for just plain good looks. Heading into winter—where in most parts there will be at least a month or two of less than favorable weather—we decided we’d add a few things to one of our plain-Jane company rides to help it suffer less during four or five months of winter while hauling parts, trailers, and who knows what else. First, we had our RPM Vehicle Project Team hit the net for some research on what we needed to add to the Ecoboost V6 equipped 2014 F150 SuperCrew 4x4 you see here (read – spend some time surfing the web looking at cool stuff). Since all parts are not created equally, we were looking for quality and positive feedback rather than the least expensive. We’re thrifty, but smart, and learned a long time ago that there is a lot to be said for
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getting a better product at a fair price than settling for cheap part/ cheap price. To go one step further, good customer service is a must for us and you really can’t put a price on that. As far as your own research goes, trust us, what once was “buyer beware” in today’s world has transformed into more “surfer beware” (web surfer, that is). You can do all the research you want and sooner or later you’re going to find somebody whining about something on the web, we guarantee it. Just a word to the wise: know enough to put all that into perspective and work, as we do, on the “majority rules” concept. In other words, if 100 people love it and two hate it, chances are those two are pretty hard to please or have hated everything they’ve ever owned at some point. With this in mind, we came down to a final short list of products and called on our own real-world experiences over the years to guide us to our final choices. Our initial goal was pretty straight forward: protect the truck and our cargo, and to do that we needed a bed/box protector and some type of tonneau cover. You may recall last year when we
DECEMBER 2014 | RPM Magazine
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1: Installing the Roll-X couldn’t be much easier unless it came with the truck! All in all it was about a half-hour install for one person. This advanced tonneau cover has a tough aircraft aluminum channel underside covered with high quality all-weather vinyl.
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2: Simply line-up then spring-clamp the rails in place and install the three rail clamps on each side.