Bed liner

Exactly how do you plan to use the truck bed? Hauling dirt or using a cap and hauling groceries?

If it's a cap and grocery hauler, I'd suggest a BedRug.

Lena

For toughness, ya can't beat a Line-X. There's also a new product out, and it may not have hit you yet, called Line-X Xtra. It's a Kevlar re-inforced coating that gets sprayed on after the base liner is aprayed. It protects from UV rays, makes a tough liner even tougher but still doesn't detract from the grip. I'm not a dealer but I've been hearing about the stuff, this guy, that IS a dealer, says the liner will still look like new years down the road.

I've seen Rh>Any thoughts on bed liners?

Hi!

What more can I say? I like the Bedrug product. Over time I have hauled firewood, heavy, icky tree limbs, chainsaws, big tool boxes, gasoline, starter motors, generators, tractor batteries, computers and quite a few other things...some of which were rather hard on the 'rug itself.

By accident I have tried to put cuts in it. There has also been the odd battery acid, oil or gasoline spill. Nothing seems to faze it. The Bedrug is also quite nice for knees and sleeping if you ever get kicked out of the house or something. ;-)

I have been very impressed with the product. All I have to do to clean it up is to use a sponge mop and some soapy warm water. After rinsing and drying all is well once again.

William

I Installed the Herculiner on my old 77 Chevy myself. It was OK, but it did start to peel in a couple places after a couple years. Might have been my rushed install job though! If I was going to get one of these types of liners NOW, it would be LINE X. Think they are the best, though SuperLiner I like also. Not a big fan on Rhino.

My Current 03 Silverado I have the BedRug in it. I like that a lot. I also have a Power rollup Top on it to Cover it.

Its my wifes truck so it will be used for hauling light loads of stuff(camping grocery's ect) once in a while junk to the dump. I'm thinking about a rolltop cover for her for x-mas. And I really like the look of the bed rug. Will it fade in the sunlight? Does anyone know how the linex feels on bare feet? Btw lena my wife's name is lena and she is from md too.

Haven't had mine long enough to comment on fading. It is covered (Leer cap) and the glass is dark enough that it won't see much sunlight. But I did an exhaustive search (Google) before I bought, and just about everything I read was positive from folks who had the BedRug for a long time.

I bought mine from

the shipping was (still is) free. When I first looked at thissite in March '05, they were the cheapest and the price was $279 formost models. A week later, when I went back to submit my order, theprice had jumped to $289. Now I see that the prices start at $330.The popularity of the BedRug must be driving the prices up.

I AM YOUR WIFE, AND YOU BETTER GET ME THAT BEDRUG NOW IF YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOOD FOR YOU.............. just kidding.

Lena

Greetings,

I have LineX in my 2004 Chevy and love it. I decided to go with LineX after I looked a friends' trucks with various other brands of liners in them. The Rhino Liner in at least two trucks I looked at looked faded after only a year, and one was peeling (although this was probably a bad installation). One guy had the do-it-yourself liner he bought from J.C. Whitney (Herculiner?) but even though he followed all the directions and was very meticulous it still looked uneven (definitely a difference between spray-on and roll-on). One of the things I like the most about my LineX liner is that they took the time to spray down the back of the truck on the rollpan behind the rear bumper and up underneath the bed rails. This is coverage you just won't get with a bed rug or mat.

I've had drop-in hard plastic bed liners - never again! Water collects underneath them and they rub the paint off the bed, which leads to rust.

A bed rug sounds nice, but I personally think I would only get one if I had a topper or other weather-tight cover. My local Chevy dealer sells custom fit bed mats made from shredded plastic soda bottles. They are nice and thick, very soft and resistant to most anything you would expose it to. But if there is any chance at all that dirt or moisture will get between the liner and bed floor and walls that will cause paint damage or rust then it's just not for me. We have too much rain here in Central Florida for me to be comfortable having one with an open bed.

Cheers - Jonathan

Have you seen the new tests that the Army is doing using Line-X products? They are using it along with the armor kits to reinforce vehicles against bomb blasts. Saw it the other night. Impressive to say the least. They showed how it bonded with the steel and made it much more resistant to damage by blowing up a truck with the coating on it.

Services test spray-on vehicle armor Polymer-coated steel cheaper, lighter than 'up-armoring' with plates

By William Matthews Special to the Times

While the Army urges Humvee makers to speed up production lines and turn out more up-armored versions, to send to Iraq, the Navy has discovered that it might be possible to protect existing vehicles with a spray-on polymer armor that's lighter, cheaper, and - maybe - as tough as steel.

The Office of Naval Research has achieved promising results with spray-on armor applied to Marine Corps Humvees, Rear Adm. Jay Cohen, the chief of naval research, told a House subcommittee in March.

Using photos of Humvees hit by mine blasts, and a section of polymer-coated steel, Cohen demonstrated how the armor, sprayed on the bottom of the vehicles, could protect troops riding inside against explosions and shrapnel.

The Marine Corps Warfighting Lab is testing the polymer armor to determine whether to start spraying it on Humvees headed for Iraq and possibly on Humvees already there.

If a spray-on, plastic like coating seems an unlikely substance to protect troops against mines, roadside bombs and small-arms fire, it struck Navy engineers that way too, at first. "We don't understand 100 percent how it works," admitted said Roshdy Barsoum, a program officer in the ship, hull, mechanical and electrical systems science and technology division of the Office of Naval Research

"We have a panel trying to understand how it works."

Traditional steel armor and newer ceramic armor "both have very high strength and toughness," he said, so it is easy to understand how they repel bullets, shrapnel and the shock of explosions.

But with the polymer, "we're talking about something more like rubber," Barsoum said. Under ordinary circumstances, "people would have ignored it because it did not seem likely that it would be any good."

The concept was actually born in the aftermath of the 1996 truck bombing at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. That's when the Air Force began searching for novel ways to harden buildings against bomb blasts.

In late 1999 the Air Force began experimenting with "an elastomeric polymer" that is commonly used in the commercial world as a spray-on truck bed liner. Air Force Research Lab scientists reported that the truck bed polymer is "flexible, ductile and has modest strength." But when sprayed on an unreinforced concrete block wall, the lowly liner proved to be remarkably effective at keeping the blocks from shattering when exposed to a bomb blast.

The Air Force's goal was to find a way to keep chunks of concrete, brick and other construction material from fragmenting and killing people inside buildings. The spray-on coating is being applied to walls in the Pentagon, a defense official said.

The Air Force's success with spray-on polymers caught the Navy's attention in 2000 after a bomb on a small boat in the Yemeni port of Aden blew a 40-foot hole in the hull of the destroyer Cole, killing 17 sailors.

Cohen said he received an e-mail message from "a young man named Jake," who suggested coating the interior of hulls with the blast-mitigating polymer to prevent bombs from rupturing steel hulls.

Navy researchers tried it and discovered that when the steel plating of a ship is protected by the coating, a hull struck by a bomb blast "might have gross deformation, but no penetration - and the kids on board, the sailors, would remain alive," Cohen said.

The explosive-resistant coating came to mind again last fall when the Marine Corps was searching for a way to protect Humvees and trucks from the roadside explosives widely used in Iraq.

Tests at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland showed that the spray-on armor is effective, Cohen said. But the Marine Corps has not yet decided whether to use the armor on vehicles bound for Iraq, Barsoum said.

The polymer is made up of long chains of cross-linked molecules, he said. Although judged by the Air Force to be of "modest strength," it works as armor because it makes steel behave very differently, Barsoum explained.

"Most materials break under very high loading rates." That's what happens to steel when exposed to the blast of an explosion. But the polymer coating "makes it not do that." Essentially, the polymer armor spreads out the shock of the explosion and limits the damage, Barsoum said.

The polymer armor is made of polyurethane, polyurea or a mixture of the two, according to Air Force researchers. It can be sprayed on, brushed on, poured on, or fashioned into sheets and attached like steel armor, Barsoum said.

It can be applied to the inside or outside of Humvees and other vehicles to limit damage from bombs and prevent metal fragments from being blasted free and wounding or killing vehicle occupants, he said.

Compared with steel armor, the polymer armor is lightweight and cheap. It weighs about 5 pounds per square foot, Barsoum said - about an eighth the weight of steel. At a cost of about $20 to $30 a square foot, a Humvee could be armored for less than $10,000, he said. Current steel armor kits for Humvees cost much more, he said.

If sprayed or painted on, the polymer armor easily can be applied to existing vehicles. Troops in the field could do it with relative ease.

"These are not dangerous chemicals," although a face mask and protective clothing would be required during spraying, Barsoum said.

The armor's light weight fits the military's requirement to remain light and agile, he said.

One potential drawback, however, is that spraying armor on Humvees and trucks could increase the temperature in the passenger compartment.

"We have to worry about the folks inside - if they can still operate," a spokeswoman for the Office of Naval Research said.

William Matthews is a staff writer for Defense News.

Painted on liner is a BIG waste of $$$$$$ mostly for clueless people.

If you get a dent in the back, it will always show!!!!! Duh !!!!!

With a plastic liner, it pops back into place and you never see all these dents if you get them!!!

Amazing how many people don't think of this until its too late and then they regret it.

It may show BUT it won't rot out the bed like the slip in liners that scrub the paint off the bed. Plus this is a TRUCK. If your worried about putting a ding in the bed buy a car.

Until the bed starts rusting out. My local Line-X place has some demos in the waiting room. One is a basketball coated in the product. Bounce it on the floor (or attempt to) and it just stops dead. There's a cinder block coated in the product, you can drop it on the floor, it holds together with no problem. This stuff is TOUGH. A drill will go through it, but it's gotta be sharp.

I never took the opportunity to drop a pallet of cinder blocks in my S-10 bed to see if it did any damage, but the bed of the truck appears to be used well, with only minor dents in the wheelhouse panels.

I had a Pentaliner (plastic) on my '92 Chevy PU, put a rubber mat under it to keep it from rubbing the paint, and had carpeting on top of it so it wouldn't kill my knees if I crawled inside. No rust or paint damage whatsoever in 14 years. Another good choice, IMHO.

Lena

i like linex best, have put them in last 3 trucks i owned, nothing beats them i say. BUT thats just my thoughts

Like hard rubber with texture. Kind of exactly like what you might imagine.