Truck Upgrades – Mudflaps and Tonneau Cover

While stationary for a month in the Pacific Northwest, we took the opportunity to do some upgrades to our 2022 Ford F-450 truck that we’ve had on the wish-list for a while.

Mudflaps

When we bought the one-year-old truck in 2022 it came with Ford OEM mudflaps on the front only. After about a year, one side had completely torn and broken-off, and the other side was partially torn. The main reason for getting new mudflaps, however, was to avoid the splatter that was thrown-up by the trucks rear wheels and would accumulate on the front of the 5th wheel.

After researching mudflaps quite a bit, and considering both Ford OEM and other options, we settled on the Duraflap brand mudflaps. These mudflaps had great reviews in several forums and were easy to order and customize on the Duraflap website. They weren’t available to purchase in stores, but the online order process and shipping was super-easy and efficient.

When ordering on their website, you select your make, model, and year of truck and then you have several options to select from related to mudflap dimensions and metal weights. The website includes information and guidance on how to measure the truck height to select the best mudflap dimensions. Based on the website guidance we selected the standard length and standard width mudflaps. These give about 7-inch clearance at the rear tires to the road, which drops to about 5-inches when towing the 5th wheel. The short and long options reduce or increase the standard length by 2-inches respectively.

The other main option when ordering is the addition of stainless-steel weights to the bottom of the flaps. There are many options for finish and pattern on their website, however we opted to go with plain mudflaps (no weights) as we liked the clean look of all black flaps with our grey truck. We had read several reviews that said the weights were not needed as the mudflaps themselves were quite thick and rigid.

Installing the mudflaps was a relatively simple process, the most complicated part being the array of metric and imperial sockets and wrenches that were needed to remove and install the various existing and new fasteners. One of the benefits of the Duraflap mudflaps is they are “no-drill”, using existing holes and a combination of new and re-used fasteners.

Based on the limited use to-date, the Duraflap mudflaps get a thumbs-up from us. Initial performance seems good, although we haven’t yet towed the 5th wheel since installing them, so that will be the best test. I’ll update the post once we’ve done some towing.

Tonneau Cover

We wanted to install a tonneau cover to provide additional security and weather protection for items in the truck bed when we are not towing the fifth wheel, and to provide a cleaner appearance for the truck. Some tonneau manufacturers claim up to a 10-percent improvement in fuel economy, so we’ll have to see if that proves to be true.

Our choice of tonneau covers turned out to be limited as we needed a cover that could be folded and left on the truck when towing the 5th wheel, and also work with our truck-mounted toolbox. After researching several manufacturer’s offerings on-line, as well as YouTube reviews on some of our favorite RVing channels, we decided the ACCESS^® TOOLBOX EDITION Roll-Up Cover by Agri-Cover, Inc. would best meet our needs. This is an affordable American made product that has excellent reviews. The on-line ordering process was straight forward on their website and shipping was quick and efficient.

Installing the tonneau cover proved to be straight-forward. All the necessary parts and mounting hardware was included, even some alcohol wipes to clean the surfaces where the adhesive gaskets were installed.

Although the tonneau cover install was easy, we also needed to make some adjustments and modifications to the latching mechanism on our low-profile toolbox to make it work with the tonneau. Because it’s a low-profile design, the existing latches on the toolbox were so low that they were blocked by the tonneau cover header bar. We were able to solve this by installing new exterior latches that we purchased on Amazon on the sides of the toolbox and disabling the original toolbox latches by removing the latch striker.

We are very happy with the initial install of the tonneau cover. I’ll update this post once we have some experience using it stowed while towing, and also to find out if we do get better fuel mileage when its deployed.