Bed Material

My bed has a few holes drilled in it from the previous owner's camper install. It's in pretty good shape otherwise. I'm looking for some textured plastic material that's as close as possible to the bed material to cut some plugs out of and probably JB weld them into the holes. Anyone ever look for or find something like that?

I'm aware of these

$16 ABS Black Plastic Sheet 1/4" x 12" x 12” Textured 1 Side Vacuum Forming

textured black ABS sheets you can get from thermoforming, etc.. I assume the sheen and texture won't be a great match but a good place to start. I figured I'd ask here before I start ordering a bunch of samples. Also called around some local junkyards hoping to find a Toyota truck with some serious rear end damage, no luck. Thoughts?

 

How big are the holes? If they aren't huge, PC-7 is an excellent two part epoxy that can bond or span holes/ cracks. It also dries close to the color of the bed. It can be smoothed over with a putty knife.

 

dont bother. It's a truck, enjoy the extra drain holes.



Now if you really want to go extra you can clean a portion of the bed of reaaaaallly well and take a silicone casting of the bed texture to use as an in place mold to patch the holes with fiberglass resin tinted black.

 

The holes are about 3/8". A couple of them are actually on the raised sections of the bed so they're not doing much as far as drainage goes. I appreciate the "it's a truck" attitude but it is also just like me to try the casting method you described just for project's sake.

 

Place a small rosin wetted fibreglass patch under the bed, let dry, chop up some glass material to a fine size, mix it in with resin and carefully fill the inside of the bed hole flush with the rest of the bed.

 

Yeah the bed is FRC (Fiber reinforced composite) there is some glass in there but there's also some chopped strand carbon and even some organic fibers that I have see modding mine.

The most correct repair would be to sand both sides 10:1 and fiberglass patch it but honestly I'd just slap some flexseal tape on the backside and squidge some back RTV in the holes and get on with life.

A couple 3/8" holes (so long as they're not cracking out) aren't going to hurt anything.

The FRC bed while using some strange junk fiber blend in it's resin is really pretty tough.

 

You could insert - easy peazy

 

Finding textured sheets seems overkill just to plug some 3/8 holes. Personally, I would use the plugs like what jbrnigan posted above and buy a bed mat.

 

What about rubber grommets (without holes)? Here's how I plugged some original holes in my Gen 1 Mountain Top tonneau when I adapted it to my Gen 2. I wanted to save the original, wider-spaced holes so it could go back to the Gen 1 if needed.

They make these in a range of diameters and for materials of various thicknesses.

 

Ended up doing a bit of a hybrid between the fiberglass and PC7 approaches suggested here. Patched the bottom of the holes with wetted fiberglass, filled most of the remaining hole depth with fiberglass resin and cut up fiberglass strands, then did a layer of JB weld mixed with some black oxide powder on top. I poked the JB weld a bunch with a toothpick while it set to get small raised peaks in the surface, and then came back after it had cured and sanded those peaks down flush with the surrounding bed surface, and polished them up with some micromesh. Whala. Didn't take too long and now I can slide things into and out of the bed all day long without running into any hole plugs or anything, or have to keep looking at those holes.