Studio711.com – Ben Martens

You may have heard that we get a little bit of wet weather around here in the fall, spring and summer. That means that there will be a lot of tarps in my future to cover up loads in the bed when we are taking trips or even just transporting stuff around town. I wouldn’t mind having a cap for the back of the truck, but I have no good place to store it, so I started looking at rollable covers. Jay has a Truxedo model and they had good reviews so I went for it. The specific model I got was the Truxedo Lo Pro QT.

Installation took about 30-45 minutes as I figured it out and adjusted it, but now I could probably do it in 20 minutes by myself or even less if I had another pair of hands. Two rails are clamped onto the top of the bed sides and then the roll clamps to one end of the rails. You can store it rolled up or quickly unroll it and get it locked in place. There’s a tension adjustment so it stays tight and they say it will hold 300 pounds on top of the cover (so you don’t have to worry about snow load, etc.)

I would have preferred one of fancier models that rolls down into the bed, but those were about four times the cost. This was a good deal and I think it will work really well.

Tim turned me on to Plasti Dip. It’s kind of like a spray on rubber coating. I’ve toyed around with it a bit in the past, but I really liked what he did on his truck by covering the emblems with it. So I decided to copy him.

One of the great parts about Plasti Dip is that you can just peel it off whenever you decide you don’t want it anymore so there’s not a lot of concern with applying it incorrectly. The consensus on YouTube seems to be that you mask off the area around the emblem but leave a buffer around the emblem. You spray four or five coats onto the unmasked area and then carefully peel off everything but the emblem. Here’s a link to one of the videos that I found most helpful.

I did excatly that and it worked remarkably well. There were no problems geting it to break right at the ege of the emblem. I love the way it turned out and now I want to do the rest of the badges on the truck. The two F150 emblems by the side mirrors should be similar but I’m still deciding about the Ford emblems. I think it would look neat to only Plasti Dip the blue part of the emblem but that’s a bit tricky.

My truck came with big “FX4” stickers on the panels behind the rear tires. They signify that my truck is four wheel drive and has the offroad package. They don’t look bad, but I really like the look of a clean truck, so I set about removing them.

I had some experience with this type of thing before. When we bought the Escape, Ford of Kirkland put their stupid little star decal on the back. That really frustrated me and was actually one of the reasons I didn’t even call them when I was looking for somebody to sell me a truck. Don’t put your stupid $0.50 advertising sticker on my big purchase! Anyway, the first thing I did when I brought it home was use a hair dryer to heat up that sticker and then I carefully removed it. A little Goo Gone cleaned up the remaining residue.

So having that knowledge in hand and knowing that lots of other people have successfully removed the decals from their trucks, I gave it a shot. I used a heat gun on low temperature to just raise the temp a little and then picked at the decal with my fingernail. It peeled right off. I saw plenty of people online say that the heat gun isn’t necessary if the decal is pretty new. I put some Goo Gone over the area and there was no sign it had ever been there.

I also removed the EcoBoost badges from under the side mirrors. That was a little trickier because they had some bulk to them. I used a piece of floss in a sawing motion to loosen it up and then the badges fell off. They left behind a sticky pad which peeled off in one piece. Again, Goo Gone helped clean it up completely and voila. Done!

The other badges on the truck have holes through the body so if I can’t remove them without a lot of extra work.

Below is a photo of what the truck looks like now, and here is a link to a photo of it before in case you need a reminder.

Good news, my bicycle now has an EcoBoost engine in it.

How much weight can that truck haul? How much can it tow? I had very little idea how to really answer those questions before I started researching my truck purchase. I figured there was a web page somewhere that you could look it up and figure it out. And that’s sort of correct, but that web page is huge and complicated. Plus it varies by vehicle depending on the options that you chose. So how do you figure it out?

All of the info you need is printed on the inside door frame of the driver’s door. The first sticker of interest is white with black lettering. The key numbers are:

• GVWR (gross vehicle weight rating): No matter what you load into your truck, it should never weigh more than this.
• GAWR (gross axle weight rating): There is one number for the front axle and one for the rear. This just means that you can’t take that full GVWR and put it all on the back of your truck. You need to have the weight distributed so that the front and rear axles carry loads they can handle.

The second sticker is white with yellow, red and black. The main information there is the correct tire pressures but it also tells you “The combined weight of occupants and cargo should never exceed X.”

The one important number that I can’t find anywhere on the stickers is GCWR (gross combination weight rating.) This the maximum weight of the truck and the trailer with everything loaded into it. Along with the payload rating, it helps you determine how heavy your trailer can be. All I have for that is the spec sheet published by Ford.

The images in this post are from my truck and you can see that my payload is 2564 lbs and that number is the reason why I had to wait so long to get my truck. If you don’t get the heavy duty payload package on the F150, you’re probably going to have something like 1500-1900 pounds of payload capacity.

Those numbers might sound really high but they get eaten up very quickly. For example, let’s say the driver is 200 pounds and there are 300 pounds of other humans in the vehicle. That’s 500 pounds gone from your payload. Oh and you got a spray in bedliner? That’s about another 80 pounds. Then add up all the luggage and gear that you packed for your trip and include that. If you’re towing a trailer, the tongue weight of the trailer comes out of your payload allotment too. If you take the calculate the total weight of the trailer (including all the stuff you have in it too), about 10% of that will be carried by your truck. If you want to be extra careful, load your vehicle up with all your gear, hitch up your trailer, and get it weighed.

Now obviously your vehicle isn’t going to fall apart if you exceed the payload capacity, but it’s probably a good idea to know what the stickers say and then know how far you’re exceeding it. Going 100 pounds over is almost certainly fine. Going 2000 pounds over is probably a recipe for disaster.

So in the end, my truck can handle 2500 pounds and can pull 11,400 pounds. That should be plenty for the commute back and forth to my desk at work…