My Rear Cargo Slide DIY (Version 2.0)

[Impish123]

Sweet. Which BedCap and does it let dust penetrate to the interior?

It's a South African Smart Cap (not one of the Texas ones which appear to potentially have some more issues... Thought that's NOT first hand experience and is probably not totally accurate...). I absolutely LOVE this cap, EXCEPT for the fact that it dips down towards the rear and limits the height of stuff I can haul... BUT taking it off is not terribly hard, BUT holy smokes is it heavy...

As far as dust it's pretty good. It has a positive pressure vent on the top (which HATES car washes and tends to leak a bit, but only in car washes...) which does OK. I also used some thick 1 inch by half inch foam gaskets around the tailgate. If running at high speed on dirt roads you'll get some dust in the very rear, but overall the vent appears to do its job well.

Overall I am very pleased.

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[Impish123]

OK a few more updates.

• Installed the shelf over the fridge slide
  • Designed it to be fairly easy to remove for when I haul ALL the bikes
• ROUGHLY installed drag chain and wires for the power from the battery banks to the drawer
• ROUGHLY installed a 12v accessory outlet connected to that drag chain and wires
• Have modified my battery banks (2x 500wh batteries) to remove the stupid handle
  • One will be on the driver side and one on the passenger side
  • They will be linked via a customer 12v to 15v adapter since these stupid ones won't charge unless they have 14+v dumped into them... Heaven forbid they charge off of 12v...
    • They were sub 150 bucks each (I have a total of 4 of them, 2 for the truck 2 for the camper...) so you get what you pay for...
• Have found a high power USB-C charger which I will use to charge the two batteries
  • Oh yeah, they'll charge at 65w via USB-C so that's a lot easier
    
    
    
    

 

[FloridaAussie]

Each summer we take 2-3 weeks and go explore as a family. Generally focusing on National Parks, but hitting up cool places as we go. Started before my wife and I were even dating when we planned a trip to Alaska together in 2004 (started dating during the planning of said trip). 2010 we did Colorado and Utah in my 2005 LJ, camping the whole time. 2012 we flew to California and did two weeks there and found out she was pregnant out there actually. We bought a Forester (I kept my LJ) and we did Michigan's UP the next year in our little backpacking tent... All that to say, we've been doing this a while at this point. Bought a LivinLite 10.0 popup in 2017 and in 2021 started traveling with Sarge. Right off the bat I built a cooler slide that just slid into the back and then had a spot for the kids' bikes (I'll see if I can find some photos), but as the kids got bigger and the trips got more complex we needed a better way to haul their bikes and I wanted a 12 volt fridge.

So build cargo slide version 1.0 in 2024 and it worked real well (first couple of pictures). But needed to be a bit stiffer (used thin-ish plywood) so I am working on version 2.0 now. I am reusing the slides which are anchored on the forward tie-downs (I removed the D-Rings and just bolted the 1x6's in their place...).

This time I am using 1x12 shelf boards cut to size and have added a dedicated cooler slide as well (the batteries used to be under the fridge in version 1.0, they will be off to the passenger side on version 2.0). I will post photos as I think about it and get around to it since it is still very cold here in Ohio!

Love your background story, thanks for sharing. That is awesome.

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