Using swing case with bed stiffeners?

Do you have any welder friends? If it was me, I’d cut the hinge plate so it could be welded on the stiffener. Or weld a gusset and foot piece to the hinge plate to be used as a stiffener. Or mark where the holes line up on the hinge and drill them out on the stiffener, and bolt it all together. You’d likely have to make the holes on the stiffener to bed part longer to accommodate what I’m guessing is 1/8th inch steel of the hinge piece bolted behind the stiffener.

 

I swear there's a thread for everything on TW. I was just looking at this same problem today.

As I mentioned in another thread, I was looking at mounting a Cali-Raised antenna bracket to the right of the tail gate, but the gap between the tail gate and the fender on the passenger side wasn't large enough (plenty of gap on the drivers side). Wrote to Cali to see if they've had this problem before. They said it was due to the composite bed shifting around and mentioned bed stiffeners.

Looked at installing stiffeners from Cali, Chaos, and Rago. None of them are going to work out of the box with the swing cases. Looks like I'll have to find a shop to fab something up, but I'm not even sure stiffeners will take care of the problem I'm trying to fix.