Cool Truck Bed Divider - DIY!

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. We love having a short bed truck. It doubles as a car. And when we use our cover and we put groceries in it, you need a truck bed divider, and we built a really nice one. I'm going to walk you through very quickly, step by step, what we did to build ours, and you can modify it for yours. Stay tuned. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. We love having this truck bed divider that allows us to put things at the back about 20 inches of the bed of the truck, and that stops everything from sliding forward, because you know, as soon as you do put groceries in there or a fuel can, and you got to do a lot of tie down and all that sort of thing, it gets to be a real pain. Now, truck bed manufacturers or all of our major manufacturers usually put in slots and pockets and attachment points for these types of devices, but each one of them, they're different. So I'm not going to supply any plans for this, but I'm going to show you the principles of it, and then you can build it to fit your particular situation. One other thing, and that is you can go really simple, you can go high grade. We took kind of a hybrid approach. I combined both aluminum channel as well as fir lumber, just regular construction two by six, and then I pimped it out at the end using some really nice hardware that I think you'll like. Before we get started, though, I'd like to ask you a favor. If you find this video to be helpful, won't you like it? And better yet, subscribe to our channel. And when you do, ring that bell because you'll get notified approximately every Friday of a great other video episode coming out about Maggie's Kitchen out in the yard, the garden, the shop, or great product reviews. All right, let's get to it. All right. The first thing we did is decide on the material that we're going to use. And here you can see we used a one and a half by one and a half U channel anodized aluminum. It's a really nice stock. It's not the least expensive, but it's really durable and it looks great. So we got started with that. Now you can see here the truck pockets that are in the side of the truck in our particular model. And whether you own a Jeep, a Dodge, or any other vehicle, Ford, whatever you've got, when it comes time to do this project, you've got to locate those pockets. And then you can see here that it's about, in our particular case, about 20 inches in usable space in the backside. Yours will be different, but that was important to us to determine what size of articles could go in there. Now, the next thing I needed to do was determine the width between the edges of pockets there. And I used a little trick here, and that is simply taking two aluminum yardsticks and C-clamping them together with each end here. And as you look up close, you can see here where I'm pointing that I just took 36 inches, and then I add the opposite dimension coming the other way and came up with the distance between the edges of the pockets. And then I subtracted out about a quarter inch to give it slide-in room. Now, you're going to go ahead and cut the aluminum stock to length at this point. And if you're using aluminum, not something like any that's ferrous metal, you really cause a problem. But you can actually cut aluminum on your woodworking blade by feeding in slowly, clamping it very well. And, of course, I use eye protection as I do this. But you can see here where I've marked the aluminum. Then I went ahead and entered the saw into the work. And then we have a finished cut. All right. Then I brought back the metal and put it in the bed just to make sure that it fit well. And even though we don't show it here, it was a little tight. So I went back and trimmed it a little bit. All right. I wanted this truck bed divider to do a little bit extra duty for me. So what I wanted it to do is to be in plane. If I drew a straight line from the top edge of the tailgate down to the front corner of the bed at the bottom, what was that plane and how far off the bed was it? And therefore, I could do some dimensions to know how high to build this. So I took a straight edge, put it from the tailgate down to the front edge, and then I used a framing square and stood it up into the channel, clamped it in so I could see how long the pieces of wood that I was going to put in there later needed to be to end up with the right width there. So I'm using the actual objects themselves to come up with a dimension here. And you can see just to get a little bit understanding more of what this looks like. I'll give you a little bit of a swing around on this. So you can see how it's all temporary clamped up. And then you can see at the very end, we ended up with a height that the overall height from the inside of the bottom channel up needed to be 13 and three quarters inches. So we subtract out the thickness of the back spine, came in at about 13 and a half inches to put it back together to come up to 13 and three quarters. Now something I want to point out here, we use a WeatherTech folding aluminum sheet top that we really like, but it has some tracks that you affix to it using some permanent clamps or semi-permanent clamps, but you don't take them on and off. They're installed essentially once for the system. And your pickup truck is going to have a lip over the edge that goes in towards the bed from the outside. Well, this means you can't build your bed divider the full width of the sides there and expect to get it in there. You have to do some calculation, a little bit of prototyping to make it work. And that's exactly what we did here. But I just wanted to show you, you need to be aware of those overhanging lips there that are on the top there that have to be accounted for when you construct this. Well, we came up with the fact that the top bar, the top view channel, needed to be one and a quarter inches longer than the bottom so that when I split that one and a quarter in half on each side, you had five eighths inch overhang over each side. So and you can see that right there, we measured that five eighths and then started marking all of the places, the spacers or the pieces of wood were going to go in between, as well as where all the screw holes. And I chose to do two screw holes on the face and one on the spine of the back. So each piece is affixed with six screws, three on each end. Now, here you can see I just started doing some spacing out and seeing what I liked it to be. And this is another place you can customize your rig if you want it to be another instead of one on each end and two in the middle. You want to put five, you want to use something else. This is where you customize it for you. I wanted somewhat big spaces so that if I had some moldings or something I was transporting from my local home improvement store, I could just kind of run it through that space there and tie it off. And the truck bed divider would help me in that without having to strap it so hard down to the bed. So you choose that, come up with the way you want. But you can see my process here of just visually citing it and making the spaces pretty much equidistant. And that's what we ended up doing at the end. Then I went ahead and marked the screw locations and doing that, I just simply used a punch, an impact punch, which is my go to tool for these type of things where you can see there's a dimple that's left that when you do this, that's where the point of your drill will go in or the drill bit as you start to drill and it won't wander or skate across the surface. It'll stay put. And I do that even when I'm using the drill press because that just really helps. At this point, go ahead and start drilling the holes here. And you can see here where I'm drilling the single hole on the back side of the channel, the spine, and then I'm rotating it over and drilling those other two that I alluded to earlier. And I'm just using a counter bit set with the right size drill bit in the middle that allows the screws to just drop in cleanly without any binding. You're not wanting the screws to actually thread in the aluminum. You're wanting all the threading and the holding power to be in the wood itself. So size it appropriate and then get going there. Now, once I've got all the holes drilled, you can see this is all laid out. Everything's about ready to go here. And now it's time to just do some cleanup. The aluminum is a little sharp on the edges. Aluminum is kind of a gummy material. When you cut it, it's going to leave little burrs. They're not as sharp as steel, but they need to be cleaned up anyway. So I just use my stationary belt sander. And we went ahead and got all of those cleaned up. I held the stock flat on the bed so that you got really nice uniform or flat on the surface of the table, the sander. So you ended up with really nice chamfers on all the pieces. If we're going to do it, let's do it nice. So we went ahead and took some time getting this right. Now it's time to turn our attention to the lumber. I just use standard two by six construction SPF, which is spruce, pine or fir. Number two or better, fairly inexpensive. But I tried to pick something straight, had a minimal amount of knots in it and went ahead and edged it. But more work needs to be done. So at this point, we need to thickness plane it. And I used a piece of the scrap stock to see how thick the material was. And as you can see, the channel didn't fit. So it need to be thickness plane. And I did so by taking multiple light passes on both sides of the piece of wood just to dress it up nicely until you could see that I got the slip fit that I needed where it fit right with the piece of channel on a correct fitness. Now I went ahead and took some time to edge sand the piece of wood. And then you can see here that when you edge sand, the edges are very sharp. They're 90 degrees to the edge and to the face. So that's a pretty sharp edge and it's hard on the hands. It's also prone to damage and nicking and chipping and all that. So I just used a round over bit in my little Palms router and went ahead and knock that off with an eighth inch round over. Now it's time to do a dry assembly. And this is very important just to see how things are fitting and how it all looks together. And when we did that, looking good so far, we brought it back to the truck bed, put it in to see that everything fit and it did fit beautifully. But we're not out of the woods yet. There's still modification. So at this point, we went ahead and put in a couple of bolts on the bottom that actually came out of some steel racks that we had that that scrap hardware bin paid off nicely with these couple of nice foot bolts that I went in and installed, taking care not to put them in the same positions where the pieces of two by six were going to be and also measuring over to assure that they landed on the ribs correctly, not in the valleys, but in the ribs of the truck bed. So they're not sitting in moisture. So we got those installed and then we went ahead and started modifying the last out outrigger or the ones that are on the outside edge. Now, you'll notice a couple of things here. First of all, notice that they've been modified now and there's a part that's bumped out and a part that's cut away. That is to address the fact that when you put this in, if I put it full length, remember those overhangs we talked about? I couldn't get it into the space. So what I have to do is get where the bottom goes into the slot, drops down and lets me start pivoting up so that I can get the whole divider to drop in correctly. So those are the slots. That was my first cut. And you'll see later I had to modify them again. And that's one of the values of prototyping and not putting everything hard and fast, but dry clamping and all that so you can get them together. All right. Then I also took opportunity to use some Bondo to go ahead. I like using Bondo for these types of painted projects because it cures very quickly. It tightens up the knots. It's pretty inexpensive. So I went ahead and bonded all the knots after that was dry, scraped it off, sanded it. And then I went ahead and painted everything black with a gloss enamel just to dress it up a little bit, make it fit into the truck decor a little bit better. So we went ahead and got that painted. Now you can see here, these are some of the accessories I'm going to put on it. Attachment points, as well as some hooks that you'll see in use here in a few minutes. But that was my hardware packs that was ready other than all the screws that I used to put it all together. Now it's time to go ahead and lay out on the uprights where the hardware is going to go. And I just use a little combination square so I can get all my spacing equidistant plus my punch and put the screw hole punches in place. And then went ahead and affixed the hardware. In this case, the attachment points, kind of like a D ring on a swivel. And there you can see the completed set of them ready to be installed with the rest of them. Then at this point, I dry clamp things together and the center two again, I did not put the ends in hard and fast. At this point, we went ahead and put in the screws on the ends through the spine of the channels and then in the face. And then while I'm at it, since we're making it look nice, I just went ahead and detailed the screws. I like on Phillips screws, the pattern to be at a 45. So I just rotated all of those, took some time so that if one of you stopped by ever or one of my friends or family comes over and takes a look at it, those little details pay off and it wasn't just kind of thrown together. So I went ahead and did that. Now, notice aluminum tarnishes a bit as you're handling it or it's out in the weather and that was sitting outside for a little bit. So I went ahead and took opportunity using a grit impregnated rubber block to go ahead and buff it all up. And you can see the difference as I'm starting to scrub through it here and then what it looks like afterwards. And then when we had it all assembled, I went ahead and used Ruxtoleum's kind of a clear coat on it just to doll it up and to keep it from tarnishing for a longer period of time. It's a hard working tool. I know eventually it's going to get dinged up, but I'm going to enjoy it nicely. Initially. All right. Now, you'll notice in this I told you about when we went and put it together, there was another needed alteration. I had made a slight error and I could not tilt up the piece enough. Hey, that's what us makers do. We figure out how to do things on the fly sometimes. And this is no exception. So I had to do a little bit of fancy carving there to get it to fit correctly. And when we did, now you can see it installed. And I took some time here to go ahead and put some nice hardware on the edges with those hooks. And I just go ahead and bundle my ratchet straps, one on each side. They're already there, bundled, ready to go to work. If I need to strap something down or affix it to this. Plus, you'll see on the attachment points, I'll go ahead and put on bungee cords across there so that if we're doing groceries or we picked up some cartons or something or something that will fix itself nicely to the cargo holder there, we can just strap it to it, such as fuel cans and all that. So we are really pleased with the way this turned out. And it'll be a hard working tool. You know, if you have something like this that you have done, why don't you send us some comments and let us know about it? Or if you've got some observations, improvements, hacks that you'd like to do. That's what we love about this medium. We love to have conversations. Write it in the comments below and we'd love to hear from you. And if you found this video to be helpful, won't you like it? And better yet, as we always ask, subscribe. And when you do, ring the bell so that you'll be notified approximately every Friday of great content, whether it's from Maggie's Kitchen, out in the yard, the garden, the shop or great product reviews. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.