tonneau on a 5 ft 8 box: soft roll up, hard tri fold or retractable, and is the mpg claim real

soft tri fold on mine for six years, the vinyl over aluminum frames kind, 380 dollars at the time. i will tell you exactly what it has been worth and the mpg is not on the list.

my chainsaw and my generator are still mine. that is it. that is the whole value proposition and it is enormous. before the cover i brought the saw inside every night and sometimes i forgot and then i did not sleep well. a cover is not a safe, anybody with a utility knife is through a soft one in nine seconds, but it stops the man walking through a trailhead parking lot who sees nothing and keeps walking.

second thing, everything stays dry. i did not realize how much of my life was spent moving wet cardboard before.

mpg: i have never been able to see it in a tank, and i drive the same 31 miles to work every day and i write it down because i am that kind of person. if it is there it is smaller than the difference between a headwind and a tailwind on Route 220.

i have bought all three styles for a fleet that lives on dirt and i can give you the only number that matters to me, which is how many of them i am still using after three years.

soft roll ups: two winters, maybe three. the vinyl goes chalky, the velcro along the rails stops gripping, and once a corner starts flapping at highway speed it is done. for 450 dollars every third year nobody complains, and on a truck that gets traded at 90,000 miles that is the right answer.

hard tri folds: these are what we buy now. the panels take a man standing on them, the latches are simple enough that a guy in a hurry does not break them, and i have five that are past four years. the failure is always the same, the hinge fabric between panels cracks where the sun hits it, and in your climate that will take twice as long as it takes here.

retractables: beautiful, and i own two and will not buy a third for a work truck. the canister at the bulkhead eats eight or nine inches of your bed, which on a 5 foot 8 box is real, and the rails have a channel that fills with grit. one of mine jammed half open on a Tuesday and that is a bad day. if it is a nice truck that lives on pavement they are great and i would not argue with anybody who bought one.

the thing nobody tells you until you have one. every cover takes away the ability to put something tall in the bed and shut the lid. with a dog crate, a pallet or a bagged load you are opening it anyway, and at that point you own a very expensive piece of weather protection for the front two thirds of your box.

i actually tested the mpg claim because i had a cover come off a truck i sold and i had two weeks with and without.

method, such as it was. same 148 mile loop, Fort Smith out to Ozark and back on I-40, cruise at 70, two runs with the hard tri fold on and two with it off and the tailgate up both ways. filled at the same pump at the same station and did the arithmetic by hand off the odometer, not the dash computer, because the dash computer is a mood ring.

with the cover: 21.4 and 21.1. without: 20.9 and 20.8. so 0.4 mpg, which sounds like something until you notice my two runs with the cover were 0.3 apart from each other. the cover is somewhere inside the noise of my own right foot and the wind that day. i am not saying it is zero. i am saying nobody is finding 2 mpg and whoever wrote that on the box knows it.

if you want to see how little a tailgate or a cover moves a number, the government's own figures for your truck are at fueleconomy.gov, and the test cycles those come from are a lab on a roller at steady speeds with no crosswind, which is the opposite of a Sierra on 35 in february. nobody's cover was in that test and neither was your trailer or your roof rack.

buy the cover because your tools get stolen, not because of a sticker on a box.

opposite climate, same lesson about seals. soft roll up on mine and after about eighteen months of louisiana rain the front seal where the cover meets the bulkhead started letting water in, and i had an inch of standing water in the front corner of the bed because the factory bed drains are not where the cover dumps water.

what fixed it was cleaning the channel. the rails have drain holes at the front corners and mine were plugged solid with pollen and pine needles, and once water cannot leave the channel it goes the only other place it can. i poke them out with a zip tie twice a year now and it has been dry since.

if you are going to have five months of snow sitting on top of a cover, find out where the water goes when it melts, before you find out in your toolbox.

first frost here was tuesday morning so this is the right week to say it. keep a can of silicone spray in the truck and hit the cover seals and the latch pins in november before you need them, not in january after they are already frozen shut.

the other winter trick for a tri fold. do not fold it open with four inches of wet snow sitting on it, because all of that goes into the front of the bed and then it freezes to the floor and lives there until march. brush it off first. takes thirty seconds and i have learned it twice.

and if you are hauling anything with the cover folded forward, strap the folded panels down. they will stand up in a 60 mph headwind, and a 60 lb aluminum sail hinged to your bed rails is not what you want happening behind you on an interstate.