Video Transcript for DIY 2022 Chevrolet Colorado Installation for the etrailer Soft Tonneau Cover

Hi everyone, Aiden here at Etrailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at and later we'll be showing you how to install the etrailer Soft Rollup Tonneau Cover on our 2022 Chevrolet Colorado. Now this is gonna be a soft rollup cover, which is one of my favorites just for maximizing your truck bed space. You'll see it a bit when we roll it up here, but it leaves you with a lot of room in your bed. So with this being a soft roll-up cover, it's not gonna provide the best security because that vinyl material can be cut through if someone really wants to. Of course you've got your locking tailgate and keeping your stuff covered up out of sight does keep it out of mind.

But if you are keeping valuables like tools in the bed, I would recommend investing in a hard cover because should there be a thief that comes up that tries to get into your cover, this is gonna be fairly easy to get through if they're determined enough. But a hard cover, while it's not thief proof, it's certainly going to be a much greater deterrence and keep your stuff protected inside. But if you aren't really keeping things in the bed full time, you're just looking for general bed coverage and basic weather protection, then a soft cover in my opinion is the way to go. It's gonna give you those fuel economy benefits. They're typically a little easier to operate and really easy to install.

This etrailer one, like you'll see later, is actually really easy to install. So it's one of my personal favorites and that ease of operation is because it's just simple and lightweight. So if we open up our tailgate, you'll see these two yellow pull handles, you can pull this one of them and that will release the latches. From there, all you gotta do is roll the cover up and this is where it becomes easy because that vinyl isn't very heavy. Some hard covers, especially hard folding covers with the large panels, they start to get heavier and heavier as you bring them closer to the cab of the truck.

So it can be kind of a nuisance in that regard. But when you get it all the way to the cab, all you gotta do is buckle it in on both sides to keep it secured and keep it from unrolling. But this right here is why I like the soft roll-up covers so much if you don't need the extra layer of security and it's because they give you much more full access to the bed of your truck. This roll takes up minimal space and because it's a soft vinyl material, if you needed to take a large box and push it against the bulkhead, you can move this around a little bit. It's not just rigid and stuck there, so you're not, in my opinion, sacrificing any significant bed space with this and on your Colorado, that becomes very important with the five foot bed here because we already don't have a ton of space to work with on a short bed truck, every little bit counts.

With the way these rails are designed, they will sit on top of your bed rails and they will slightly cover the stake pockets here. So if you wanted to add accessories like tie-down points, you're not gonna be able to anymore. A lot of people don't really opt for that these days, but if that is something you're interested in, I'd recommend looking for a cover that sits on the inside edge of the bed rails. But on the inside, we can take also a closer look at the clamps that attach it. They are completely tool free here, so it's just a hand knob that clamps this down and tightens it in place. And because it's tool free, if we ever did wanna remove it, say to just get a little bit extra access to the front of our bed, if we wanted that roll out of the way, it'd be really easy to just undo the hand knobs and take the thing out of the bed. Now for weather protection, that vinyl material is gonna have really good water runoff and you'll see that a bit more once we deploy it. But at the front of the bed, there's a rubber seal that overlays the entire bulkhead. So water there will run off and just down between this gap, as I unroll it, you'll see that on the edges, it's going to hook into two strips of hook and loop and that'll cinch down and make sure that nothing can get in there either. And once I throw the cover here of that final latch, all the wrinkles in the surface are now out and the bars in the middle that provide some support are bowed up. So it's gonna help that water run off the sides and not pool up in the middle. Plus, there's a lot of tension on this cover so it shouldn't droop down. Should the material stretch over time, that's okay. You can adjust the tension really easily at the ends. And for the tailgate seal, it's a similar rubber flap and with the way it sits up, you're probably not gonna have much luck closing the cover with the tailgate up because that rubber seal will get in the way. So close the cover, then close the tailgate and it'll wedge into that rubber strip and keep the tailgate protected too. And here's the latch you can use to adjust that tension. There's two set screws in the side. The tonneau cover comes with one Allen key that you can use to loosen those. And there's measurements up top so that we can adjust both sides evenly and draw it closer to the tailgate to tighten it up as that material stretches over time. Now I've installed a lot of tonneau covers on a lot of different trucks and I've done a couple different styles on other Colorados before this one. And I gotta say, the etrailer Soft Rollup is a personal favorite of mine because it is really simple to operate and I think you just get a great value with it. Like I said before, if you don't keep valuables in the bed full time, you're just looking for a way to keep it protected from the elements and just keep some things out of sight, out of mind, whenever you do haul things in there semi infrequently, then this is gonna be a great option. And I think one of the best advantages you get by choosing this is the easy install process. And we're gonna take a look at what that looks like on your Colorado right now. We'll start this installation off in the truck bed and setting our rails on top of the bed rails. They are side specific with little stickers on the end telling you right or left, right for passenger side, left for driver. And this clip here with that sticker will go towards the rear of the vehicle and these will just set directly on top of the bed rails. I'm gonna have 'em kind of hanging towards the back right now a little bit more than we need because we just wanna give ourself plenty of room to take that soft roll up and set it on the bulk bulkhead with this weather flap towards the cab. And as we set it here, we're just gonna do our best to keep it pretty centered and we'll take notice at the very end of this small corner bracket where there's this nut and a set screw on the inside. But this block needs to slide in the end of our side rail here. Just slots in, can be a little tricky to line up, but once you do, push it in all the way and tighten up the set screw using your included Allen Key. Now I unbuckled the roll to give us a bit more room, but you want to pry up on that weather strip as we push our cover forward a bit. You want it to lay flat and ideally over the bulkhead just a little bit 'cause this is our weather seal for rain protection and it's gonna give us the best protection by having a small amount of overlap here and not being curled up underneath itself. That's gonna let a lot of water in. So it's a little short, but right there's looking pretty good. I'm trying to get the cover also straight on both sides. So if you want to get more precise with it, you can maybe take a measure from the end of the rail or the cab to the start of the cover on both sides and make sure it's even here. For our clamps, they're gonna come preassembled, but you're gonna have better luck just taking the hand knob off and the bottom section of the clamp off because it's just gonna make it easier to clamp around the bed rails here. Now your positioning here doesn't need to be exact. You just want one close to the tailgate, one close to the cab and one relatively centered up, avoiding these yellow stickers. So this side, because of the way the bed's shaped isn't gonna work for us on the tailgate end, I'll just move it to the other side of that sticker, snug it down a little bit, just enough to hold it and repeat that five more times, three clamps per side. And I'm just gonna leave it about that tight for now. If I need to make adjustments later, I can. And we'll see how it fits. With all six clamps loosely in place, just enough to hold the cover still as I unfold it, we can do a test fit and this will just determine if our rails are parallel enough to one another and how our spacing is doing relative to the cab and the tailgate. You might have some packaging material you need to remove, that's okay. But once you get to the end, clip those tabs in, throw the cover down and if it's a little snug, we will probably come back up and loosen that. This is the first one I've done straight out of the package where it maybe seems a little tight, but overall it feels good. Tailgate clearance seems pretty good here too. If anything, I think we could probably scoot it a bit closer to the the cab there because we are hitting that weather strip so much and more weather strip overhang on the bulkhead isn't gonna be a bad thing. So since we left things somewhat loose, I'll just scoot it forward a little bit and then fully tighten everything down. But after scooting the cover forward, I'm really happy with the fit and that initial really tight close on the cover really hasn't happened since adjusting that. So just straight out of the box, I think it was probably just a little tight, but it feels good now. So the final thing I'll do is just go back through with these rubber caps to all of our clamps because they do have the threads poking out and just thread these rubber caps on so we don't have any exposed metal poking down into our bed space here, potentially snagging on cargo. But with all that done, I always like to roll it out one last time just to make sure I'm happy with the fit. But overall, I gotta say, this is probably the easiest tonneau cover you can pick to install just because it goes so quickly. The adjustments are pretty easy to make and I'm really happy with the fit, tailgate's looking good and it's gonna give you a really nice layer of protection for water on your 2022 Chevrolet Colorado. I'm Aiden and thanks for watching.