Pace Edwards Full-Metal JackRabbit Retractable Hard Tonneau Cover w Explorer Series Rails - Aluminum

Video Transcript for Pace Edwards Full-Metal JackRabbit Retractable Hard Tonneau Cover Installation - 2024 Chevrolet Silv

Hi everyone, Aiden here with etrailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Pace Edwards JackRabbit Full-Metal Retractable Hard Tonneau Cover with the Explorer Series Rails on our 2024 Chevrolet Silverado 2500. So, the first thing to note is that this is a retractable canister-style cover, and you'll see that canister in just a second. But the benefits to that (knocks) that hard cover is that it's gonna be a lot more secure. And if you're the type of person that keeps tools or something valuable in your truck bed full time, I always recommend a hard cover because that's gonna be the most theft resistant. And this one is no exception.

It's gonna be constructed of these full metal slats that interlock with one another, and because they interlock, even if someone did try to get a knife between these seams, there's nothing to cut. It's all metal. So to get through here, it would be a task. And I never say anything is thief proof, but this is certainly going to do a good job at keeping people outta your bed. And when talking about security, obviously this will work with your locking tailgate to keep your stuff safe inside.

But this does have an exterior latch, so the way you operate the cover and open it up is done through this trigger outside. But that has its own separate lock and key so you can keep that secured too. And I do like the fact that it has that exterior mechanism because if you don't want to open the tailgate to open the cover, you don't have to. Whereas with some other tonneau covers out there, you'd have to make that choice. And up front here we can see a better look at the canister.

Now the advantages you're probably noticing right out of the gate is the fact that it doesn't add any height to your bed rails. You might be familiar with the folding style of tonneau cover where when it's fully open, it sticks straight up and down and it's gonna block your back glass. That's obviously not ideal if you need to fill the bed up with stuff. But, you can see the downside to the canister style is the fact that it's taking up bed space. The cover's gotta go somewhere.

So, for me, if you're looking for a happy medium between the two, it'd be a hard roll-up cover and that's going to sit in a larger roll at the front, but take up no bed space and block minimal window space. But if you're looking for the absolute cleanest look from the top up, and you don't mind sacrificing that space in the bottom for the canister, then this is a nice look and it's pretty easy to operate. So a lot of people do like it. One consolation to the occupied bed space though is the fact that that canister doesn't go down the whole way. There's quite a bit of room still underneath this and if you had something longer like some lumber, maybe sheets of plywood or drywall that you wanted to slide all the way up to the bulkhead of the truck, you could. And while there are drain tubes on either side of that canister, the way we installed it today, and you'll see this later in the install, we tried to locate those somewhere up high so they're out of the way. And we could still do that without having to run the drain tube down through the floor. Now the reason those drain tubes are there is because water can get into the canister and you don't want it pooling up in there. Those drain tubes allow it to get outside of the truck bed and outside of the canister. Because while there is weather sealing all around the side rails, the bulkhead, and even the rubber seal that will touch your tailgate, water could still get in on top of the cover and into the canister and that's their way of taking care of it. The included pull cord allows me to operate this cover entirely from the tailgate. And as I'm pulling it out, you'll hear a series of clicks. Every 12 inches there's going to be a latching mechanism that engages and allows the cover to stay open at certain intervals. So if you are hauling something that's slightly longer than your bed can accommodate, let's say right there, and we wanted to close up the tailgate and have something like some lumber kind of propped up against the end here, we could still have the cover mostly closed for that improved fuel economy and aerodynamics, and in some cases weather protection, and not have to worry about it having to retract or not staying put. But we can also just fully close it up, like that. The other nice thing I will say, if your Silverado has this feature, is the MultiPro tailgate. It's gonna function great with that and you can get the same thing accomplished by having those elongated items fed through the gap here and having the cover fully closed. It's just nice to know that if you have that feature, it's still gonna work here and you don't have to sacrifice it. Now as far as the aesthetics go, this is a really low profile cover. The tonneau cover itself actually sits below the bed rails, so the tallest point is just these side rails, only sticking up about three quarters of an inch from the bed rail. But while we're here, let's talk about what those Explorer Series Rails mean, and that's gonna refer to the presence of this T-track, making this whole tonneau cover compatible with certain ladder racks from Pace Edwards, particularly their utility and contractor ladder racks. Those are gonna be pretty heavy duty and designed to work in conjunction with the cover and allow you to carry maybe some of those elongated items like ladders and lumber and conduit up top while keeping the covered locked storage for tools underneath. If you plan on using your truck for work and you want that protection inside the bed, it's a really good combo to pair those two together and get that. You can have the covered storage and the longer storage up top. The other piece of that MultiPro tailgate that you might be looking at is the grab handle. And while these side rails are a bit bulkier to accommodate that T-track up top, there's still plenty of clearance for that handle to work. I have run across certain covers that stick out pretty far and might not play super nice with this piece, so it's good to know that it still functions properly. Now your truck at home might look a little bit different, but ours has the factory towing prep package and I'd want to know what kind of clearance we have for something like a fifth wheel head. So going from the tallest point on this corrugation in the bed to the underside of the cover, we're looking at a 20-inch gap. I'd say 19 and a half for comfort, just because 20 inches would be putting you right up against the edge of this cover and you might run into some contact between the fifth wheel head and the tonneau cover. Again, with this being such a low profile option, it's not gonna give you the most clearance out there and if that is a concern for you, you may consider looking into a different cover that sits more on top of the bed rails than it does flush with them. And this is a full clamp-on installation. So no modifications for the clamps here. And on the tailgate side, you'll notice we've got these extra kickstand supports which will help provide support at the end of that rail, which is really useful, especially if you plan on pairing this with a ladder rack. So overall, I think this is a pretty solid option if you're considering a canister-style tonneau cover. You might consider comparing it to something like a Retrax cover, especially if you like the T-track option. Retrax makes a cover that's compatible with a Yakima ladder rack. So, if you're looking more on the sports and rec side of things like putting a tent up here or maybe carrying some kayaks, in addition to having covered locked storage say for camping gear, I'd consider looking into that one a bit more. This option from Pace Edwards is going to lend itself more to the work site application. The ladder rack this is compatible with is much more utilitarian and is going to be better for those work applications. But if you like everything about it and you're curious about the install, we're gonna walk you through the whole process together right now. Now to start off your installation, you want to get an extra set of hands and have them help you get the canister into the bed. You can wrap the pole strap around the canister and use that to help lift it on your own, but I found that a bit unbalanced and with the plastic sides of the canister, I didn't feel very confident about the stability of it with that either. So I had a friend help. And we just set it on some sort of elevated surface, in our case, these bins that we have, roof rack parts for the shop use. But you can use the box that it came in, anything to get it elevated above the rails, and start to attach the side rails of the canister. I already did the passenger side, but I'm gonna show you how to do the driver's side next. They're both gonna be the same, just mirror images of one another. Now it's not super easy to tell which side rail is which upon first inspection, but if you flip it over, you can tell by looking for this cutout. That's going to be on the canister side, or the cab side of the bed. And there's also gonna be this L-shape in the weather strip. That bottom piece again will go towards the bulk head or the cab of the truck. I'm also gonna just while I'm here, peel the backing off. There's no adhesive back here, it's just backing for a foam seal. I'll get the other end in a second. And at the tailgate side of your rails there might also be a sticker if it hasn't come off, you know from the factory or just over time faded away, that'll say left or right. Left will be driver's side, right will be passenger side. You also wanna make sure that your cover is unlocked and twisted to the unlatched position. You can tell by looking to this side right here. There'll be a tab sticking out if it's locked. Right now it's pushed in because it's unlocked. And it's worth pointing out right next to it we've got a hole. That'll be a mounting location that matches up with a threaded hole on the underside of our side rail that we just showed you right by the cutout on the cab side. Now this part's gonna be hard to see and a little finicky to get right, so we'll do our best to show you and do it at the same time. But I'm gonna take your side rail, line it up vertically where that cutout is around the tonneau cover, and twist it into place. There's a T-channel there, so right now I'm just trying to lock it in, and pull the cover along as I push the rail into place. Now this side went a lot smoother, I will say. Probably because we have the other side installed already, it's got some structure to it, so if it doesn't go that smoothly for you, that's okay. The second one should go better. But we'll look underneath and see if the holes that we've pointed out earlier are aligned. To secure those two together, your hardware's gonna include this silver Phillips head screw, a lock washer, and a flat washer. And just use a Phillips head screwdriver to secure that from underneath. So now we can remove the supports from underneath and set the whole assembly down. Could be helpful to have an extra set of hands like Tom to help us out, and just lift up on that side a little bit while I get this side, and set it down just making sure we watch our fingers. Next, you wanna close your tailgate and get the positioning of the rail set. Your kit comes included with a number of shims and that works out to be about a 16th of an inch, which is what we want as a gap between the end of the rail and the tailgate. So right now you'll see I've got a little bit of space in there, I'm just gonna pull this towards me until we've got that touching on both sides. And repeat that process for the passenger side too. What I'd recommend doing is, by the way, just pushing this as far forward as it can go before closing this tailgate. That way you make sure you don't hit anything or mess anything up when you go to close that. And with the tailgate spacing in place, I'm going to lay down some painter's tape on the front side of the rail here, just right around the corner, so that when I slide this forward and put our weather seal for the bulkhead in place, I can move it back to the spot where I know I like the positioning. When laying that weather strip down, it's a pretty good idea to try to position this as close as you can to the edge. You'll see based on our painter's tape marks, that where the cover sits will be right about here, and that's right where I want that weather strip to sit. So I'm gonna slowly work my way down, peeling the backing off as I go, trying to keep it even. And just know that if you've got a spray-in bedliner like this, it's probably gonna give you some trouble with adhesion. So you can try to wipe it down before you go to stick this, but what I've found is once you press it down, don't touch it. The weight of the tonneau cover setting down on top of this is what's gonna hold it in place and the more you mess with it, the more it's going to want to lift up. So, work your way to the other side, trim the excess off whenever you're done, and we can move on to the shims. I always like to trim off a bit more than I think I need because this foam compresses pretty well and it's a great way to make sure that you don't shortchange yourself. Just compress it and stick that down. The shims that I mentioned earlier are gonna be for right on top of the foam seal. These can be found in the same bag as those Phillips head screws from earlier. There's gonna be a white one and a black one. You just wanna stack them on top of each other and put them on the edge of that foam seal. Each one will have a backing and have adhesive underneath. So I'm just going to stick the black one on top of the white one since it's marginally smaller and stick this to the very edge of the foam seal. This is just designed to bring this edge of the side rail up a bit more level with the bed rail. Once this has a little bit of compression to it on the foam, it'll sit pretty much perfectly even on top there. And with both sides done, we can move the whole assembly back in place, lining it up with our painter's tape. And at this point I like to install the top cover. The orientation of this is gonna be determined based on these holes here. They're offset a bit and they'll be closer to the cab end of the truck. And as we set this on top of the canister, you'll notice that there are some threaded inserts that should line up with those holes. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just slide them as far forward as they go on both sides so that I am sure I'm not putting this on crooked, and I can line up the holes as best I can. When you have it lined up, you can take these black cap screws and get those secured with a Phillips head screwdriver. And when they're tightened, they'll sit flush with that top cover. But you can slide this back and forth however you really need to, I'm just trying to get it so that the weather seals line up with one another and this is sitting flush with our side rail there. So here's an overview of our clamp hardware, and I wanna point out that there's gonna be a few minor differences. So these pieces are the parts that actually slide into the tonneau cover side rail, and they're obviously different sizes. The shorter one will be for the tailgate end of the truck and the longer one will be for the cab side of the truck. The other pieces that will join together with them and form the clamp that actually holds this together are gonna be the exact same, so no worries about those. And the only other thing is that the hand knobs that actually secure down the clamps, will have a longer one that goes with the longer bracket. So just make sure you keep those straight and we can show you how to actually install one of these clamps. On the underside of the track, you'll find those reliefs right next to some of these silver spacers/stopper pieces. You basically just wanna get your clamp aligned with that relief and slide it towards that spacer. So it can be a little tricky lining this up at first, but you'll notice that there's small inserts there that'll align with tracks. And there we go. It just slides towards that piece and whenever it stops, that's when you know you're in the right spot. Now the other end of the clamp can get fed over this round section like we saw earlier. The key to this that I found is to push the whole side rail assembly in. It will relieve pressure and allow you to really smoothly slide that in. Now as far as hardware goes, there's going to be a barrel nut on the back, that lines up with a groove on the backside of the clamp, and the threaded hand knob will get a lock washer. Try to keep my hands outta the way for you. And a flat washer. Feed that through, thread it into the barrel nut, and tighten that up all the way. Or at least for right now, I'll get it mostly snug. I'll repeat this process for the remaining three clamps and then fully tighten down everything. When all four clamps are in place, the final piece you need to add is this kickstand and that'll go on the tailgate side. So I've got the wing nut and everything off right now. This bolt is going to slide through the bottom of our clamp on that tailgate end. Now with the shaping of our bed, I found it best to go feed it in from this side, because you'll see that we're pretty far from making contact with the sidewall of the bed. But if I angle it pretty aggressively up, there's this angled section of the bed that we can just barely reach. So I'm gonna unthread this out until it starts to make contact. And we want this to be pointing straight. We don't want that foot at a weird angle. And I'll just tighten it from there the rest of the way to get a stronger hold on that kickstand. But also be sure to secure the other side. The hardware will be included, flat washer, a lock washer, and a wing nut that will tighten down to keep this from sliding out. Now at this point I like to check for fitment just to make sure this slides smoothly. And it is a bit stiff right here, but I wouldn't say it requires any extraordinary force to get to close all the way. And that can be pretty typical for these canister-style covers. I wanna check for tailgate fitment too. And right there it is feeling like it's maybe a bit close, but there's a lot of things that need to break in. All these rubber seals are pretty rigid right now, but overall I'd say this is pretty good. And as far as opening goes, I'm gonna unlatch it. And while it doesn't slide freely back, I can move it without a ton of extra force, so I'd say that's pretty good. If we needed to, we could go back through and adjust our clamps. Maybe depending on our bed if we needed to, we could add additional shims, the rails ship with shims on them, but if you're having bad fitment issues, the kit does include additional ones if you need to adjust those rails to become more parallel. But I'd say in our case today we're good. We'll lubricate the seals underneath to help slide that a bit smoother too. We'll do that later in the install. But for our case now, I'd say we're good. The next major thing we need to take care of is our drain tubes. And you'll notice that there is a slot on the bottom of the canister over in the corner here where we can push this up through. I'm gonna wait just a second to do that until I drill my drain tube location where it's gonna exit the truck bed. And I've scouted out right here. I looked behind the bed to make sure there's nothing on the other side that I'll drill into. And I've done this process on the other side and right around here is a good spot. I like it because it's outta the way and tucked up pretty high. But it could go down to the floor if you wanted to and enlarge this existing hole. Just really depends on your preferences and your truck. But for us, we're gonna go right through the middle here using a step bit. Just slowly checking as we start to drill and work our way up to the right size. (drill whirring) This hole's looking pretty close to the final size, but you'll notice it's a bit messy. So I'm gonna go back through with the burr bit and clean up some of the sharper edges and that'll wallow it out just a bit more. (drill whirring) With that drilled out to the proper size, we can start to feed it through, and I'm gonna try to angle it down as best I can. But it can sometimes be helpful to just get something like a yard stick if you have one, or just something kind of thin to go between the cab and the bed and just push this down and help angle it down, 'cause it is a pretty rigid tube and doesn't necessarily want to, but this one's actually cooperating for me pretty well. As I get it pretty close to its final position, I'll push this drain tube up into the canister and twist it to lock it or see if I can get these tabs to align and just click in on their own. I basically just don't want it to pull back out. It's not a super audible click, but feels like I got that to engage pretty well. And I'll just feed this in the rest of the way so that there's no low spots in the drain tube. One of the last steps we need to do is find a place to put this hook and loop strip to basically just secure our pole strap. So I'm gonna just mock it up. I like to stick it to the underside of the side rail here just to keep it off of the bed. And right there is where it reaches, so I'm gonna peel the backing off of this included strip and I'll place that on this flat edge underneath where the strap can stick to. And the end of your strap can go through either the rear clamp, or personally I like to go through one of your tie down loops. And that'll just hook and loop to itself. So all this is held off to the side, leaving the bed open, but when you need it you can take that off of the hook and loop at the front and pull it closed. And last, but certainly not least, is the part that I mentioned earlier, lubricating underneath the sweep seals. So the wipe comes with your kit, that rubber flap is the sweep seal, and we're just gonna go up and down the whole length of the rail on both sides. And since we tested for fitment earlier, we know we're all good in that regard. This is then just the last step for us to make sure that the cover operates just a bit more smoothly. And I think the finished product here is something to be really proud of. It's a pretty smooth process. Already with that sweep seal lubricated, that cover is moving so much better. But, that'll do it for our look at and installation of the Pace Edwards Jackrabbit Retractable Hard Tonneau Cover with the Explorer Series Rails on our 2024 Chevrolet Silverado 2500. Thanks for watching.