Tips For Picking Bed Liners For Trucks
The right truck bed liner keeps a pickup looking good longer or makes an older truck look better fast.
Keeping a truck looking good and making trucks look better are mostly what liners are all about anyhow, don't you think?
There are so many liners on the market now that picking the right one is quite the struggle. Getting the wrong one is in some cases worse than getting nothing at all. That will become clear if you read on and get some hints for getting the best truck bed liner.
Bed liners are a little like gloves for your hands. It isn't so much that work gloves protect your hands, which they do. It's more that you can get more done if you have gloves on. Otherwise you're so busy dealing with hurting hands that you can't get much else done.
Liners are sort of the same way. Who wants to beat up an expensive truck just to haul something??? But with the right liner you can use a truck and still maintain the look, and value, of the truck...
Read on for more on liner types...
Truck Bed Liner Types
Following are the types of liners with a few listed that are in a way in a class of one. Those are described more in other pages. Here are the liners by type...
- Plastic Bed Liners
- Spray In Truck Bed Liner
- Do It Yourself Bed Liner
- Carpet Liners
- Truck Bed Mats
- DualLiner Truck Bed Liner
- BedRug BedTred Liner
Since these are just types it is easy to break them down into all sorts of other categories. Fo example truck bed mats can be either rubber bed mats as well as carpet truck liners. But then again the mats are custom fit or cut to fit too.
In addition some of the liner types are almost defined by brands. Spray in bed liners are associated with Rhino Liners as well as with the Linex bed liner even though there are all kinds of other brands that produce and install spray on truck bed coating.
The DualLiner and the BedTred both are something like plastic bed liners which include the DuraLiner and PendaLiner too. But for both of these liners the liners differ enough from others that they are somewhat unique.
Scratches to pickup truck box are bad enough and can quickly make a mess of a pickup box without some repairs but the repair of scratched paint is not too tough.
Here's where you get in trouble though.
I watched a young fellow once loading firewood in a pickup.
Now what happened as he and his buddy got in a little pitching contest to see who could throw the chunks the fastest. At least I guess that was what they were doing. Anyway, the wood chunks were going at the truck fast and furious. A few started to go astray, bouncing off the back window and the fenders and so on.
But in most cases they were hitting the box.
But throw split pieces of oak at a pickup and you get some serious impact forces. With nothing in the truck for protection, not truck bed coating, no drop in liner, no nothing, what you get does not look pretty.
What he and his bud inflicted on that poor Ford Ranger that looked almost like new at that point, was lots and lots of big deep dents.
Dents to truck beds are serious trouble.
Scratches I can fix. Deep dents to the floor and wheel wells of a box are a different matter.
Dents to that Ranger bed likely reduced the value of the truck by hundreds if not thousands of dollars in just a few minutes.
Check out the articles on the left for more details on protecting pickup beds and keeping them looking good while still using a truck like a truck.
Bed liners for trucks or some sort of truck bed coating could have stopped most or maybe all of what happened to that truck and kept the little truck looking good instead of making it look like a piece of junk.