Rail Kit Installation - 2004 Ford F-250

Installation of a Rail Kit on a 2004 Ford F-250

All right, today on a 2004 Ford F-250 long bed, we are going to install BestRail kit part number 42730. One of the first things to do to prepare the rails is apply some camper tape to the bottom of them which is supplied with the kit. There are three rails we have to do this to. It is really simple. We will apply the tape to this edge here, over this gap, and onto this ridge right here. We will just work our way back all the way down. Repeat the same process on the other two rails. The next step is to slide three of the clamps into each one of the BestRail side rails. Using an 1/ 8 inch Allen wrench, we are going to install four of the 1/4 by 20 by 3/ 8 inch set screws in each of the corner brackets. Next we are going to go ahead and take the front BestRail and place it on the front rail of the truck bed.

You want the foam tape to go ahead and lay on the bed rail itself. We are going to slide the angle bracket into the front channel here on the front rail. And the other side of it is going to merge into the side rail here. And that is going to help connect them together. What I have done is actually applied some white lithium here through the tracking just to help with the ion of the corner bracket here. Now that we have got the side rails and the front rails attached together using the corner brackets, we are going to go ahead and set up the proper positioning by using the corner covers here. What I have kind of already done is adjusted the front rail to make sure it is centered in between both sides of the truck. We are just going to place the corner brackets on top here.

You want to make sure that both set screw holes are aligned with the rail. We also want to make sure when we are doing this that the rails butt up to the ribs inside of the corner brackets here. So you want this one to butt up to here and this side to butt up to here. And then once we have insured that the corner covers are set up properly. You can go ahead and remove them. We can go ahead and tighten down our set screws here. Start by doing the two inner most ones first. And then we can reinstall our cover and tighten the two outer ones. And we want to repeat that procedure for the other corner. We want to check our dimension in between both side rails here. The dimension we are looking for is 58 3/ 4 inches from inside to inside. You also want that same dimension here at the back of the vehicle. If you do not get 58 3/ 4 inches, you want to go ahead and loosen your set screws back up. Find your rail either inward our outward depending on which way you need the dimension to go. Next we can again remove the corner caps and we are going to put our channel extrusion and our beltrail extrusions into the channels. The channel extrusion will slide into the outer most channel here. We just want it to come out and place it to where it is even with the end of the rail here. And then the beltrail extrusion we will go ahead and slide into the inner most channel. You want to do that at all four corners. We are going to repeat that for the other side as well. And then we can go ahead and put our corner caps back on and this time we are going to go ahead and screw them down.

We are going to be using the number eight by 5/ 8 oval screws. Make sure we do not over tighten these, but just enough that the caps sits down there nice and flush. And again we will repeat that for the other side as well. Okay, now that we have got the corner caps on, we can again just check the alignment of our BestRail system. From the side to side just kind of eyeball off of the side rail itself. The vehicle with the bed caps on them here you can actually use the ribs in the bed cap to check your alignment. From front to back we are going to take the dimension off of the tail gate and what we are looking for here is we want our best side rail to be a 1/ 4 inch forward of the front edge of our tail gate here. All right, now we have got those dimensions set up, we are going to go ahead and set our clamps up into position. We want to first start by threading our 5/ 16 by 18 hex nuts onto the 5/ 16 by 18 by 2 1/ 2 inch bolts. We are going to take and thread it all the way down to the head of the bolt but we do not want to tighten it down like so. We want to do that for all six of them. Make sure that the front clamp is centered in between the wheel well and the front of the bed. Then the other two should both be behind the wheel well and we want to center those two evenly in between the tail gate and the wheel well.

Once we have got those evenly centered, we can go ahead and the hex nut and bolt combination. What we want to do is to use the hole that coincides best with a tight fit against the back edge of the under side of the bed rail here. You can obviously eyeball it and see which one is going to align the best but we want to also make sure that we are holding true to the 58 3/ 4 inch width. Then we just want to take a 1/ 2 inch socket here. We want to go ahead and tighten that up all the way until it gets to the bottom of the bed rail here. But we want to make sure we do not over tighten it because it could damage the bottom of the bed rail. We want to take our hex nut here. Rotate it up to the bottom of the clamp. And take a 1/ 2 inch wrench and tighten it down against the clamp. That will help work as a jam nut so the bolt will not loosen up on us. And then again we will go in now through the two here behind the wheel well. And again you want to make sure these are centered evenly in between the wheel well and the tail gate. And we are just going to repeat that procedure that we did for the front clamps. The only thing we have left to do is to go ahead and our 10-32 by 1/ 4 inch socket headed cap screws into the end of each channel. And this is going to keep any of our accessories from sliding out of the channel itself. We have got one on each side rail here and then one on the top as well. And that will conclude the installation of of the Bestop BestRail system. Part number 42730.