Leer Latitude Soft Tonneau Cover - Folding - Vinyl and Aluminum

Video Transcript for Leer Latitude Folding Soft Tonneau Cover Installation - 2022 Ford F-150

Hey, everybody. How's it going Today, we're gonna be going over, and showing you how to install, the Leer Latitude Soft Tonneau Cover, here on a 2022 Ford F-150. It has a two-part construction. We have a vinyl canvas here, this is the top portion of it, and then we have some aluminum substructure underneath. Now, this is a fairly low profile tonneau cover. It actually only sticks above the bed about an inch and a half.

So this, as we said, is a soft tonneau cover, and there's really two main types of tonneau covers on the market, soft and hard. So, hard tonneau covers are definitely gonna be more expensive. They're a little bit harder to work with, but what they do provide, is they provide better security. So, if you're one of those people that likes to store your expensive tools in your truck bed, I'd probably opt for a hard tonneau cover, because a soft tonneau cover, let's face it, someone can come up here with a knife, cut the vinyl, and get your tools out. However, where a soft cover comes into play is, if you're gonna be using your truck bed a lot more, meaning you need to haul those longer items, such as a couch and fridge, they're much more easier to manage and manipulate.

They're also more cost effective. So this is a tri-fold cover, meaning it's gonna fold back onto itself. So when we are ready to use our truck bed for those larger items, we're first gonna drop the tailgate. And then on either side we're gonna have a set of pinchers down here. Doesn't matter which side we go to, we have to release one side, the other side will come off as well.

And then we're just gonna begin folding the cover back. Not one, but two times. So, this is how it's gonna be when we do need to haul those larger items, so unfortunately, you are giving up a little bit of your truck space here, because we can't fold it another time towards the cab, but this is still plenty of truck bed for most of those larger items, such as refrigerators and whatnot. But, if you do need to access your full truck bed, it's actually not too hard just to take the cover off entirely. Now keep in mind, if you will be driving with the cover folded back like this, you do need to make sure that you buckle it, so you don't ever have to worry about it coming accidentally open when you're out in the highway.

If you're gonna be able to see the weather stripping on either side here. So, this is just gonna do a great job of helping keep water out of your truck bed, keeping everything inside nice and dry. So that's pretty much it for this cover here. And it is very easy to install. It's completely bolt on, there's no modifying to the vehicle whatsoever. It should only take you guys around an hour or so, depending on your experience level. We'll go ahead and walk you through the entire process step by step now. To start our installation today, we wanna go ahead and get our tonneau cover out of the box here, and just loosely set it in position on the truck bed. So what we're gonna do first, is we're gonna make sure it's the same distance apart on either side. So, make sure it's even left to right. We also wanna make sure it's relatively flush to the header here at the back of the cab. But once we do that, we're ready to go ahead and unfold it. So, we're gonna undo these little buckles here, and then we're gonna carefully, not shifting it, fold it back towards the tailgate. So, once we've unfolded it here, we're hanging off a little bit more on this side than we are over there, so I'm gonna go ahead and shift it that way. And then I'm again just giving it overall a visual inspection here, to make sure that we have the same amount of overhang on either side But once we're happy with it, we'll go ahead and fold it back up. Now we wanna be very careful when we're folding it back up, that we don't shift anything to change the position again. And now that we're happy with where the cover is, we're gonna carefully fold it back up towards the cab, making sure we don't shift it from its position. So now we're gonna crawl underneath our tonneau cover on either side, and we're gonna secure the front panel closest to the cab with our little fasteners here, that look like this. So, we're gonna need one of these on each side. So, there's three little slots here in the bottom of the cover on either side. For our particular application, the middle one is gonna line up best with the edge of our truck bed rail. So, we're gonna take this square part, go ahead and stick it up in that keeper. And once we push it up, we're gonna be able to slide it outwards towards the truck bed. And this is actually gonna lock into position. And then basically, we're gonna press our little aluminum lock up so it grabs the edge of the bed. And then we're gonna begin tightening down the thumb knob. Now, you wanna be careful not to over tighten this, and you don't need any tools whatsoever. We're just gonna snug it up as best we can. And then we're gonna jump over to the other side, and do that same thing. So, next we're gonna be installing our secondary clamp here. So this is already attached to the bottom of the cover, and it's already preassembled. So, go ahead and loosen that thumb screw there, pull the two ends of the clamp apart, and then we're just gonna loop it under the edge of the bed there, just like that. And then once we get it on there, I'm gonna use one hand to hold it up there in place, and the other hand I'm gonna use to tighten it down. So, now once we get this one snug, don't tighten it too much, just tighten it up by hand enough. Then another quarter turn. We'll just do that same thing over on the other side. So, next we're gonna go ahead and close the cover all the way. Unfold it the rest of the way. And then, we're gonna take our rear strike plate. We're gonna loosely install this inside. So, it just kinda clamps inside of the truck bed, like so. You may need to loosen these screws a little bit to get it to open up. Basically, we wanna make sure that we align it with where this latching mechanism to our tonneau cover. So, I'm just gonna hold it down, try to get the center of it as best as possible. And then once I'm sure I have it in the center there, we'll go ahead and loosen these up enough to get our clamp on there, just like that. And then before we start tightening these down, we wanna tighten this thumb screw on the bottom here. And once we get that snug, that's when we're gonna come back with our Allen wrench here. So, now that we have this side on, we'll just go ahead and do that same thing over on the other side. So, we've got both of our plates installed, our rear plates on either side. So, we're gonna go ahead and try to close the cover here. But what we need to pay attention to is this little lip here. So, if we pull back this little pincher here, we'll try to close it, and you can see it doesn't quite catch that lip there. So what we need to do is, we actually need to loosen this. We need to move it up some. Now, you may need to move it down for your particular application there. So, this is gonna depend on your exact setup. So, we're gonna go ahead and move this up as much as we can, tighten it back down, and see if we can get it to catch. So, it looks like we still need to come up a little bit more. So, we're gonna go ahead and just adjust that one more time, and then we're gonna do the same thing over on the other side, until we can get it to catch the striker. Now with both slides latched, that's gonna do it today for our look and installation of the Leer Latitude Soft Tonneau Cover, here on a 2022 Ford F-150..