Today on this 2002 Chevy Silverado 1500 series short bed, we are going to be installing the Truxedo Truck Sport Tonneau cover, part number tx281101. Okay the first thing we are going to do is go ahead and lay out our two side rails. At the front portion of them where they are going to meet with the front bulk head piece, weve got a couple of pieces on the underside here that need weather stripping applied, and included with the kit are these four pieces of weather stripping, and a two-for-two with the radius cuts in them, go ahead and apply those to the corners. With the weather strips applied, we are going to go ahead and take the center section of our tonneau cover and go ahead and place it on the front section of our pickup bed. If you look here its already folded up out of the box, but on the other side of the front youve got weather stripping and this is the part thats going to set on the front edge of the bed itself. We are going to go ahead and release the straps for the tonneau cover and just go ahead and rotate the front section under the front portion of our truck bed.
These strap pieces here are actually going to sit outside and we just want to make sure its centered up on the bed evenly and then from there well take the two side pieces that we just put the weather stripping on and we are going to merge them into the front track piece here. Okay go ahead and repeat the same thing to the other side rail. You are going to have three clamps per side, we are going to put one towards the front, one in the middle, and then on at the rear. You can see here at the top side, the teeth of the clamp, we are going to merge into the grooves built into the side rail. We are just going to leave these loose for the time being until we get our final adjustments made and then we will go ahead and tighten them down.
Go ahead and repeat that for the other side rail. With the clamps loosely installed we are just going to do another quick check of our tonneau cover, we are going to make sure again that its even side to side on the vehicle and that the side rails are aligned evenly throughout the length of the bed. Then once weve ensured the tonneau is centered in and even down both rails, we can go ahead and tighten the front clamps down. Okay the next step in our process is go ahead and set up our rear clamps and to do that we are going to go ahead and roll the tonneau completely out and actually lock it into place near the tailgate and to do that we are just going to roll the tonneau cover out and go ahead and merge the rear section into the clips at the rear of the side rails and what we want is this leading edge here if we catch inside of the clips on the side rails. We are going to do that on both sides of the vehicle and just go ahead and press down on the tonneau and it will lock itself into place.
Now this is kind of difficult to tell exactly how it is supposed to sit, because this particular vehicle has a skid guard built into the top side of the tailgate here, but if you look down below and you see that the weather stripping doesnt meet up with the tail gate itself and thats what we are looking for, and you can also see that the corners of our tonneau here, they do meet at full with the rear edge of the bed. Okay we are going to go ahead and drop our tailgate and go ahead and release the tonneau cover, to do that there are two release clips, one on each side of the vehicle, just pull them straight down. The first one will release pretty easy, if you want to go to the second side and you want to make sure to hold the tonneau cover as you release it, its under a lot of compression and it will shoot up into the air. What we want to check also here is an eighth inch spacing in between the edge of the side rail here and the rear edge of the tonneau. Its going to move on you side-to-side when you attempting to gauge that dimension, buts if you pull straight back on the tonneau and just let it drop in.
That should leave you with a pretty straight forward gauge of how much distance you have. It looks like our passenger side looks pretty good here, go over to the drive side and it looks like we are sitting a little over our eighth inch, so we are going to go ahead and take and reset our clamps so that we have again about an eighth inch spacing there. Then once we have that equally set go ahead and tighten your rear clamps. With the rear clamps set we want to go ahead and roll our tonneau back up and we are going to go ahead and tighten down the middle clamps last. The only thing you really have to worry about here with the middle clamps, we want to make sure we set them as closely as center of the truck bed as we can, but we want to make sure that it doesnt interfere with the center bar that comes through to hold tension for you tonneau cover. Youll notice that when the tonneau cover is set up properly the cross bars will sit nicely into these grooves here and side rails. Theres one final piece that we need to add to the rear portion of the tonneau, just like we did on the corners of the side rails on our first step, we do need to apply the remaining pieces of weather stripping to the corners here, one on the drivers and one on the passenger side. Then on the side of the tonneau cover were just going to go ahead and fold down the hoop and loop system. Again we will quickly show you how to use this system if you want to have full use of your bed, go ahead and unlock the corners of the tonneau like we had done earlier, go ahead and roll your tonneau cover up. Part of the strap that we left on the outside earlier well take the other end of it from the underneath side and just go ahead and strap them together. Thats all there is to it. With that will complete the installation of the Truxedo Truck Sport Tonneau cover, part number tx281101.
