It amazes us that some truck owners still don't have any kind of bed liner in the box of their rigs. Painted sheetmetal and cargo just don't mix! Without a bed liner, you're going to scrape the paint off, and rust is going to get a foothold. With the myriad variety of different bed liners available today, why wouldn't you spend the extra few dollars on your new truck purchase and protect it against rust and other damage?
All bed liners are not created equal. The cheapest, and most common, bed liners seem to be the drop-in molded plastic protectors. We've had these in trucks we've owned in the past, and they protect the bed against denting and nasty paint scrapes exceptionally well. However, they also buff through the paint anywhere they come in contact with the sheetmetal, and give rust that place to start (that's the voice of experience talking there). They also have a tendency to trap water between the plastic and the metal, furthering rust development.
Spray-in bed liners have become increasingly popular over the past several years, and they seem to be the way to go. It's a thick coating containing suspended particles that is sprayed into the bed of the truck, coating everything. These liners are extremely durable, offer excellent protection against denting, paint scrapes, and rust.
Herculiner offers an economical do-it-yourself bed liner coating kit that can be installed in your driveway in an afternoon if you want to save a few bucks. A one-gallon can is enough to coat the inside of a full-size truck's six-foot bed. According to the company's instructions, Herculiner's brush-on bed liner is polyurethane-based, containing tiny suspended rubber particles, which not only give the bed added protection, but also provide traction to keep cargo from shifting.
The liner is available in a choice of colors (we went with black), and comes with enough material to coat a single truck bed. Included in the kit is a gallon of liner, a brush, two rollers, and a scuff pad. Not included, but needed, are rubber gloves, xylenol, a paint pan, and something to stir the paint with. These items added another $19.78 to the bill, but we popped for an extra set of heavy-duty rubber gloves and a paint stirrer for an electric drill. Think "disposable" when you buy all of these.
