Erickson Lever Action Cargo Bar - Galvanized Steel - Adjustable Length - 60" to 75" Long

Video Transcript for Erickson Lever Action Cargo Bar Review

Hi there, haulers. Today we're going to be taking a look at Erickson's heavy duty cargo control cargo bar. These are available in two different sizes. We've got the one for trucks here, which measures from 60 inches up to 75 inches. And there's also one available for enclosed trailers, which goes from 89 inches to 104 inches. This heavy duty cargo bar is going to take any large items that you've got in your truck and give you a stop that you can place anywhere in your truck bed.

We're using it here to haul some trash off to the dump, and we don't want our trash cans to fall over on our way there, spill out trash in the bed of our truck, and potentially go all over the highway. Rather than getting out a bunch of ratchet straps or bungee cords to tie these down, they're not going to fall out of the truck, but we don't want them to fall over and spill out. So we can put a bar like this in to hold things in place.And it's great for other things. Maybe you've got some large boxes of fragile items. You don't necessarily want to ratchet strap it, because you don't want that extra pressure on it.

You just kind of want it to keep it in place, keep it from sliding around, and this is going to be a great option for things like that. And it's also great for those awkward items that are just oddly shaped, that don't really have a good place to hook a ratchet strap or bungee cord on. You can just tuck it up against the back of your truck and put this bar in place to keep it from moving around.Using a couple of different cargo bars, this one's definitely one of the quickest and easiest to get on and off, with its lever action design. You can see it does have a tooth gear that runs along it here, and there's teeth on the end of our lever here that allows it to lock in place. There's also a small lock here on top that keeps our handle in position, so it can't come undone.

When we're ready to take it off, we'll just give our handle a little bit of a squeeze here and that'll let us release the lock. Our handle can then flip up, and once it's flipped up all the way to the other side, our arm is free and it can slide in and out.Here you can see it in its fully collapsed position, and this is going to be great for your medium and larger sized trucks. Your smaller trucks, unfortunately, may not be able to use this. We we're trying to use it earlier on an old Ranger and the truck bed wasn't quite wide enough for this heavy duty bar. Erickson does have a smaller bar that has a larger range of adjustment, that goes down to 44 inches and a maximum of 74.

That's great for those smaller trucks. The bar is definitely not nearly as heavy duty as this one, though. The diameter of this bar is considerably larger and it just feels really robust when putting it in.On the end of our cargo bar, each of the feet have rubberized pads on them to ensure it doesn't slip back and forth once you've got it locked down, and it also prevents any scratches or abrasions inside your truck bed. And this couldn't be any easier to do, especially with you're doing it with one person. Some of the other styles that have ratchets or other mechanisms, you almost kind of need two people to hold the thing over, to get it ratcheted down and everything. With this one, we'll simply push on the lock to release our handle, and we're now in a position where our bar can really move in and out. So we can just take the one side, set it up, take the other side, bring it over like this, and then just bring our bar down and snap it in place. And just like that, we're all set. This isn't going anywhere. I mean, I could probably do pull ups on this thing if I had the distance.Now that we got it installed, let's go ahead and take it out on the test course so you can see it in action. First, we're going to go over our bumps section here, and you can see as we go over the bumps, our trash cans aren't going anywhere. They're not jostling around too much. They can slide potentially left to right a little bit between the bar, but for the most part, they're not going to tip over and they're not going anywhere. And now I'm going to go ahead like a bat out of hell, and we're going to head into the slalom section here and we're going to see if we can knock these guys out of the truck bed. Try as I might, they're not going anywhere.All right, so we saw what happens when we have the bar in place. We're going to go ahead and take the bar out now, and we're going to hit the test course again, going back in reverse order how we came. So we're going to floor it here and do the slalom section first. So you can see our trash cans are flying around quite a bit. And we didn't even get to make it to our bumps course before the trash cans fell over, because when I put it in reverse, they just toppled right down.And this bar is not just for some time use, when you've got a heavy load or you've got a few large items you want to haul. Sure, it's great for that. But you can use it all the time for just your everyday things that you want to keep with you. I like to use it here to keep things stored underneath my toolbox. I've got my trailer's spare tire under here, wheel chocks, and things like that, and I hate it when they slide out from underneath my truck bed and then I've got to move them out of the way every time I want to use my truck. This keeps all that stuff nicely under here when I'm not using this to haul something large. And that completes our look at Erickson's cargo control cargo bar.