Video Transcript for 2023 Chevrolet Silverado 2500 BAK Revolver X2 Hard Tonneau Cover: Complete Installation

Hey guys, it's Jake here with Etrailer. Today, we have a 2023 Chevy Silverado 2500. We're gonna be taking a look at and I'm gonna show you how to install the BAK Revolver X2 Hard Rolling Tonneau Cover. To show off the best feature of this hard rolling tonneau cover right off the bat, we're gonna roll it back. Thing I like most about it is that once you pull that string or that cable, roll it back to the back cab of your truck, you secure it up here at the back of your truck, It reveals your fifth wheel or your gooseneck or whatever you have in your bed all while safely securing it underneath the hard cover. We have other hard covers available and they're a roll up, but it's a drum style so we'll go inside a drum underneath.

This is typically a space that's not going to be used on your truck anyway. That's why I like this being stored up here. Typically, your cover's gonna be closed, so rolling this out, it'll cover up your bed, but if you have that drum under here, I personally have a retractable tonneau cover and that drum will get in the way more often than you think. It takes up about a foot of space, which is a little bit more than what this takes up. This is gonna take up about eight inches at the front of your bed, but it's above it.

So if you have to haul lumber or anything like that, I know personally in my truck I can only stack about three two by fours before I'm hitting the bottom of that drum. So, it may not seem like a big deal having that drum in there, but having this roll on top of your bed is gonna give you your whole bed back minus a couple inches on top. The construction of this kit's gonna have an aluminum construction, rails included, and when it comes to the rails, you can see how low profile they are. There's not many tonneau cover out there that have this low profile. I would say, on the generous side it might be a quarter of an inch, but probably more like an eighth inch above the bed rails on your truck.

When it's rolled out, you can see the rubber compresses nice and tight and it's gonna give that nice factory look on the bed of your truck when it's in use. The top here is going to be an easy to clean vinyl that's gonna be over top of the aluminum underneath. So, again, you get the best of both worlds. You get the nice hard cover and then you get the easy to clean vinyl on top. I would highly recommend using a vinyl cleaner when cleaning this because it will have to be conditioned if you want it to last for years to come.

A lot of people don't condition them and that's why you'll see headed down the road some vinyl peeling back or cracking. But you're gonna have to condition this so that it stays nice and sleek. A few measurements for you guys so you know what you're getting. Our bed has a spray-in bedliner but it's probably only about an eighth inch stick or a quarter inch thick. But from the top of our corrugation to the bottom of our cover is gonna be about 20 and 3 quarters of an inch. That's gonna help you with different accessories or items you like to carry in the bed of your truck to see if they'll fit. And this counter cover still roll over top of it. And in this specific truck, we actually happen to have a set of industry standard fifth wheel rails. From the top of those to the bottom of our cover is gonna be about 19 and a half inches. It gives you a pretty good idea of, if you want to set your fifth wheel in there, of how much space you're gonna need, if that'll work with your fifth wheel camper. That's what this, the owner of this vehicle is using it for. And I got to say this is one of the best, if not the best pairing for fifth wheel hauling or gooseneck hauling because again you can get it up here out of the way. You're not gonna make contact with this roll with your fifth wheel unless you're at a full 90 degree crank, which typically people aren't doing when backing into a campground or anything like that. So, but those are just some measurements to give you a better idea if your fifth wheel will have to be adjusted or if it's gonna fit inside the bed perfectly. Once you get it to the back of your bed, I do recommend with this specific cover, closing it with the tailgate open. It seems to close a little bit better. The other thing is, is the seal is designed to be pressed this way and not come down on top of the tailgate. There actually isn't a seal up here, so that's just, it works better that way, but you can close it with the push of one hand if you have it installed correctly and then close your tailgate to make that seal. This cover is going to resist rain and other elements from getting inside your bed. What I've found more recently in the seasons that we have here in Missouri is that any of the contents on the inside of my bed are protected from the pollen too. It's something we don't often think about, but leaves, if you often park under trees, that's gonna help, any to of cover's gonna help. This one especially is going to help with rain, snow, ice, any of that stuff from getting on the inside of your bed. Now as far as the installation goes, it's not a difficult installation. I think even as you're first time installing one, you could probably have this dialed in and installed in about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. It does help to have a second set of hands to be able to set the roll up in place. You can do it yourself. We have lots of helping hands here around at the shop, so you have somebody help you set it up inside these rails and you roll it out towards the cab of your vehicle. I know it seems backwards, but in the packaging the roll comes rolled up from the back here. So, it's just gonna help to have a second set of hands, but it shouldn't take you much time at all to get it installed. With that being said, let's go ahead and show you how we did it. To begin your installation of your tonneau cover, we're gonna use some alcohol, clean up our bulkhead. The owner of this vehicle lives on a rock road, so we have a lot of rock dust inside our bedliner that we're gonna try to get out. And if you really soak your rag, you can get down in just like we are here and really clean that up. You just want it as clean as possible, so that when you stick your, we're gonna stick a seal, a rubber seal on top of here, you want it to stick. So, clean this up. We may go ahead and wipe down the top rails too while we're at it. Just, again, to be sure that our seals have the best chance of doing what they're supposed to. Kit's gonna come with two different types of seals. You have this thicker seal. If your truck comes with a drop-in bedliner, you're gonna wanna use the thinner seal that comes in your kit. But since ours is a spray-in, we'll be using this one. All we have to do is peel it back and we'll stick it. You can see how our bed starts to curve down. We'll stick it right where that starts. Stick a few inches there. And what I like to do in order to get it nice and straight is pull out the full length til we get closer to this end and set it down in a straight line. If you try to do it a little bit at a time, it almost never works out to get it perfectly straight. And when we get to the end, take a razor knife or a pair of scissors. We're gonna take our passenger side rail. It will be labeled with an R. If you have a drop-in bedliner, you want to take this foam pad off, but since we don't, we'll take this rail, set it on our, the side rail of our truck, make sure it's seated all the way against it, all the way against the bulkhead. And then we'll take one of our clamps and insert it. We're gonna go as far forward as we can, but because of this slant in the bed and these toe hooks are these loops in our bed, I don't want to cover those up, so we'll put it right, right about here will be good. Make sure that the teeth are hiding into the front here. Here you want to tighten these with a 14 millimeter wrench and what we're gonna do is we'll take two more clamps and put them on the rails. The rear most clamp is gonna be the same as the front. You wanna get it as close as you can to the rear while not blocking these tie downs. And then for your center one, you'll just measure the distance between the front clamp and the rear clamp and put it right in the middle. We're gonna do that same thing for the driver's side and we'll come back with a torque wrench and torque them all down. An extra set of hands, we can lift our cover out of the box. It is possible to do this with one person, but it is a lot easier with another person. We'll set it here by the tailgate and then, there we go. And now we're just gonna roll it up towards the front of the truck. All this packaging out. Up here at the front of our cover, we're gonna have a couple of bolts that we'll need to put in these two tracks. We like to put anti-seize on them so that the hand nuts on the inside will always operate smoothly. We'll take them, slide them into our tracks. And then, what we'll have to do is you're gonna want these two bolts to line up with these slots in our rails. So, it's just a little bit of a trial there. You can get it kind of close by eyeing it up, actually. This is gonna have to be towards the outside. I have to go in a little bit further, but you can peek in there. See where it's gonna line up. Now underneath, in order to get our cover secured, we'll take a rubber washer first, then a flat washer, and then our hand nuts. And what we're gonna do is we'll just snug them up, get them close so that our cover is mostly secured. And then, we're going to make any minor adjustments that we need to and then we can tighten them down all the way. When you're making any adjustments to your cover, there's a couple things we can do here. The seal is gonna be really stiff, or it's decently stiff from the factory. We'll pull our cover towards our tailgate a little bit more than what we think we might need. Push our tailgate up slowly and you can see we're already heading it right there. And what I'll do is we'll just push it gently right about there. And that's gonna give us the amount of contact. You can see this right here, there's a little bit of a gap. By the time our tailgate latches, this seal will compress to almost the perfect, to provide the perfect seal. So, what we can do now that we've got that measured out, we'll roll our cover back up gently and then tighten those hand knobs all the way down, and then we can close our cover. It's our top tighten down, we can test it out and make sure it's working properly. There we go. You should be able to close this back from one side or the other or the middle. If it's not, if you have to, like, close it here and then come over and close it here, it's probably a little too tight on the inside, so you might have to move your rails out a little bit. This is fitting great, so we will roll it back up for a couple more things we need to install. Now we'll have these straps that come in your kit too. They are to hold your cover open while you're traveling down the road. We're gonna install them just like we did these clamps. You can put it wherever you want, but we decided to go closer to the cover, so that our strap is gonna be nice and tight over top. You can put it on this side, rearrange your front clamp, whatever works best for you. And then we'll torque these to the same specifications as our clamps. And all you have to do hook it up, is loop it over the top, slide it in, turn it, and then cinch it down. You'll see these four bumpers here that we put on. We really just put them on for good measures on this 2500. Especially when it's strapped, it doesn't come anywhere close to the back of our glass, but that's essentially what it's for is if it we're to ever make contact with the glass that it doesn't break or scratch your glass. With everything safe and secure and tonneau cover working properly, our tail tailgate closing properly, that's gonna do it for a look at and installation of the BAK Revolver Hard Rolling Tonneau Cover.