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Truck bed liner
Everyone is stuck at home right now, which means it’s the perfect time to go into your garage, into your driveway, and get some work done on your vehicle. So, I recently bed-lined one of our trucks. I bought a 2002 Tacoma for about fifty-five hundred bucks. And the powertrain on it is solid. It’s at a hundred and forty thousand miles. Which is not too much one Toyota, and it’s had the frame replaced as part of a factory warranty. Those trucks of that generation suffered some rust issues, but the factory replaced the structure. So mechanically, the thing is sound, but aesthetically it was terrible. The paint was in terrible shape.
So, I wanted to do something with it that would be durable, make the truck look better, but mostly make it last for a long time. So, in this article, I’m going to go through the pros and cons of truck bed liner if you are planning on lining your entire vehicle.
Durability
the number one pro of truck bed liner when lining your entire vehicle is durability. And that’s the whole reason that we went for this. I am somewhat of an imperfection. However, I don’t care about how the truck looks so much. I am not planning to take the thing to Pebble Beach. I use it to go skiing, off-roading on off-road rims, camping, climbing, anything like that.
Inexpensive
another reason we went for the truck bed liner coating is that it’s cheap. The specific one that I bought was from a company called Raptor liner, and in total, I spent around 300 bucks to get the spray gun, the actual liner itself, the tint, and the hardener. So that’s not a bad price to change the entire finish of your vehicle. You do need a compressor to spray it the way we did, and we already had an excellent compressor on hand. So that made the whole process a lot easier. If you don’t have a compressor, that could be a couple of hundred bucks of additional money that you might have to spend.
You can also roll Bedliner on, and I’ve read that some people have gotten pretty good results with a roll-on product. But I prefer spraying, and if you have access to a compressor, it’s still a relatively cheap process.
Quick Process
it’s also fast. We spent maybe five hours on the entire thing, from sanding it, masking it, spraying it, and pulling the masking tape off. It was a short process, and I’ll write more in detail about that process a little down the passage.
I struggled to find many cons of doing this type of coding on your truck. but the first one that comes to mind is how it looks.
Effecting Looks of Trucks
there are a lot of trucks I’ve seen that doesn’t look quite right with this kind of texture on it. However, that isn’t across the board because some trucks look great with Bedliner. Like my buddy’s runner. Even I will admit that the old Toyota looks excellent the way it is.
But I’ve had friends whose trucks have proven both points. For example, my Tacoma didn’t look very good because when I sprayed it, I ran out of the liner, spreading too thin. But, in all fairness, that truck drove much better than the way it looked.
All go and no show, that Tacoma was a serious sleeper since we put more effort into lining my truck. Then, finally, an old Tacoma that looks like a big piece of sandpaper, and now I can drive the car into trees and mailboxes and storefronts, and I don’t have to worry about scuffs or dings. The coating has covered up even a lot of the dents that that truck already had because it’s thick enough that you can see some of the old imperfections in the metal.
You could see how these trucks look with Bedliner on them like a pro or a con. I’m sort of neutral on that. But in some instances, I do think it looks pretty good.
Hard to Remove
The primary con of applying truck bed liner to your vehicle is that it’s hard to remove. And again, that that’s the whole point of bed lining a car, is that the bed liner is not going to come off. So, it stays protected. If you painted it properly, it should be tough to remove. It means, if for some reason you were ever to want to change the way that your vehicle looks so that you could have better resale for whatever reason, that is going to be challenging to remove.
There are some chemical strippers that you can use to help soften up that coating and try to get it off. I haven’t personally tried to remove the bed liner from a vehicle. Still, I would imagine doing the entirety of every body panel on a truck would be quite a job so, once you spray the bed liner on your vehicle, you’re committed.
Increase in Mass
In my mind, the last con of bed lining your truck isn’t much of a scam at all. Many people claim that if you bed line your vehicle, it will be significantly heavier because of how thick the coating is. Of course, the weight that it’s going toad will depend on the thickness of the layer of the Bedliner that you put on it. But from the research that I’ve done, it should be about seven-tenths of a pound per square foot on average. that it adds in terms of weight which is negligible.
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