Tag: Maverick

Writ­ten: Feb­ru­ary 23, 2022 — Updat­ed: Decem­ber 30, 2022

• Cost: $45 (tracks) + $24 (stud fit­tings) + $17 (ship­ping) + $13.50 (screws) = $99.50
• Bought two 24″ L‑tracks from US Car­go Con­trol along with four L‑track sin­gle stud fit­tings to go with it. There are oth­er sizes, I just opt­ed for the two-foot­ers
• The Mav­er­ick­’s pre-drilled screw holes are thread­ed and require M8 screws

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the pre-drilled holes on the Mav­er­ick and L‑tracks do not line up, so I ini­tial­ly planned to drill 2 extra coun­ter­sunk holes in the L‑tracks to make it fit. The tracks sys­tem real­ly does look nice AND are quite light. Accord­ing to the site details, they weigh togeth­er 1.2lbs.

Next issue: the Mav­er­ick has M8 holes, the tracks use ¹⁄₄″ coun­ter­sunk hard­ware (though I found M6 screws fit bet­ter than the ¹⁄₄″). So now some holes need widen­ing

**Below is the orig­i­nal post I made using a drill to try and widen the holes in order to accept the M8 screws. It is lengthy and time con­sum­ing and ugly, hon­est­ly. Read on if you like, but ten months after the fact, I found out that all you need is a M8 thread tap and t‑handle tap­ping wrench. Prep­ping to tap the threads for the floor anchors (click me!), I test­ed it on these bed­side rails, and wow. In what took me orig­i­nal­ly a few hours, took maybe 2 min­utes. Plus, it’s MUCH nicer look­ing.

You might be able to use a cham­fer or a debur­ring tool to try and set the screw flush, but I don’t have those tools yet. Thanks for read­ing! The L‑tracks are still super awe­some, and great qual­i­ty look­ing at them even now. I was able to use them once and they were sol­id sol­id sol­id. How­ev­er, Ford now offers a Cleat Tie Down Kit for $400 if you want some­thing offi­cial**

Orig­i­nal post start

After hav­ing fun using pow­er tools to expand the holes, I real­ized that the coun­ter­sink bit I had was too small. Huh.

After test-fit­ting it in the truck bed, I returned to hap­pi­ly make holes. This part was fun, and it was awe­some to have suc­cess mak­ing the hole until…

...major prob­lem reached. Because the holes need­ed to be in the wrong part of the track, there was no way to get the coun­ter­sink bit in. That’s not that big of a deal, but the screw not fit­ting in there at all is a huge deal.

Noth­ing worked.

So, Plan B it is. Went back to the truck bed for fur­ther scruti­ny, then planned to enlarge 2 of the holes since they were both just off by maybe half a cen­time­ter. Eas­i­er said than done. Still the issue with too small of a counter sink. This project was becom­ing a total exper­i­men­tal project. Those beau­ti­ful L‑tracks were look­ing quite…worked on.

Plan C was going to be M8 sized eye­let screws. In fact, I might still do that giv­en that there is one screw hole on either side of the bed with noth­ing it.

Lots of time, teeth clench­ing, lubri­cant, and met­al shav­ings lat­er, I was sat­is­fied and went to install them.

YAY!! The screws are absolute­ly not flush, but I decid­ed that I actu­al­ly rather like it since I did­n’t spring for rail end caps and the screw heads act a bit like stops for the stud fit­tings.

Ignor­ing the weird drilled out holes, it looks pret­ty good! Just have to make sure not to hook any­thing to the ends and focus any force near the screw holds.

Pret­ty proud of myself and def­i­nite­ly learned new things today. Like to not brush at met­al shav­ings with your bare hands because lit­tle pieces of met­al in your fin­ger is painful.