BAKFlip MX4 Hard Tonneau Cover Installation - 2017 Chevrolet Silverado 1500

Products Featured in this Video

BAKFlip MX4 Hard Tonneau Cover - Folding - Aluminum - Matte Finish

94 reviews

Code: BAK48120

Retail: $1,788.48

Price:  $1,099.99

$1,099.99
After Rebate

• Tonneau Covers
• Fold-Up - Hard
• Rack Compatible
• Opens at Tailgate

• Flush Profile - Inside Bed Rails
• Aluminum
• Matte
• BAK Industries

Get style and versatility with this heavy-duty, all-aluminum tonneau. Tri-fold cover sits inside your vehicle's bed rails and secures upright for unrestricted bed access. Tailgate opens and closes with cover up or down. Matte black finish.

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How to Install the BAKFlip MX4 Hard Tonneau Cover on a 2017 Chevrolet Silverado 1500

Hey, everybody. Rob here at etrailer.com. Today, we're going to be taking a look at the BAK BAKFlip MX4 hard tonneau cover on our 2017 Chevrolet Silverado 1500. So here's what our cover is going to look like once we have it installed. It's going to sit really close to the bed for that sleek, almost factory like appearance, but, at the same time, it's inaudible 00:00:21 minus a lot of security because it's going to be a hard folding tonneau cover. So we're not going to have to worry about any would be thieves coming up and cutting anything because they're not going to be able to get a knife through that.And if you have a locking tailgate on your truck, we're going to be able to make sure that all of our contents are secure in the bed, because if we can't get the tailgate open, we're not going to be able to get the cover open either.

But to operate the cover and unfold it, simply open up our tailgate and we're going to have a pull cord, one on each side. We only have to use one. So if you only have one hand free, we can just simply pull it and flip that section up. And we can simply move to the other side, grab the other pull cord as we go and flip the sections up. And we can have the option to fold the cover all the way up so we have full bed access.

Or if we just need a little bit of section, we can have our cover held down right about here and then we have these straps to make sure that it'll stay closed.Now, one thing BAK did that I really like is they put in these prop rods on each one of the rails. That way, if we take it out, we can rotate it up, we can loosen up this knob here, and be able to slide that support up and tighten it down. And that'll prevent the cover from rocking back and forth, because, obviously, if we hit the brakes it's going to go forward, but if we hit the gas really hard, we don't want our cover to fly backwards. So if you're ever driving around and you have the cover in the fully open position like this, you want to make sure these prop rods are in place.Now, the cover is going to have that extremely low profile design. But what I really like about it, on top of that, is that our rails are barely going to be sitting on top of our factory rails here.

So it's not going to be adding a whole lot of height. You can see it's almost even with their flash, but, at the same time, it doesn't cover our stake pockets. So if we have any kind of stake pocket accessories, we can still use them and the cover is not going to interfere with it at all. Now the cover is going to have a really nice thick weatherstripping that goes all the way around the edge, so we can make sure that our everything on the inside of our bed is nice and dry. And the cover is going to be made out of an aircraft grade aluminum, so it's going to be rust-proof and extra strong and we're going to be able to support up to 400 pounds, evenly distributed, on top of the cover.Now, a lot of times, if you have a truck, you've got tools that you want to take with you or keep with your truck at all times and, obviously, everybody wants to keep them organized.

Well, when you get a tonneau cover, that kind of brings up a problem because we obviously can't have a truck toolbox back here. And with some of the other covers, like a canister style where it rolls up in, you're going to have a canister that actually goes into the bed right here, so we can't even use an in-bed box. But BAK actually has a compatible toolbox that will work with the cover, that way we can have the best of both worlds.Another great thing about our MX4 tonneau cover is that it's not going to require any kind of drilling or any permanent modification to your Silverado. In fact, in order to get it installed, all you're going to need is a 9/16 socket and a Phillips screwdriver. In fact, let's go ahead and do it together now.To start our installation, there's a few things that I want to point out that's going to kind of affect how you do your installation. Everything is going to be the exact same, except for this very first part. You need to find out if you have a drop-in bedliner, a spray-in bedliner or no bedliner in your truck, because they're going to provide us with a seal. Now, if you have a plastic drop-in bedliner, the seal is not going to be used and we don't need to worry about it, so we can skip this step in our case. Now, if you have a spray-in bedliner or a bare bed where it's just paint, you do want to use this seal.Now, it's just going to work just like some double-sided tape. So you want to make sure you clean the bulkhead extremely well. And then we will just remove the tape backing off of the seal, and then you're going to run this all the way from one edge to the other edge, going along the back here. Now, typically, you want to get real close to the inner edge of the bulkhead seal, where it'd be on the inside of the bed here. So when you're doing it, you want to have real close to that top edge, but you still want it to be vertical. And, again, you're only going to use this if you have a bare bed or a spray-in bedliner. Now with the bulkhead seal out of the way, we can get the rails in place.Now, we already have one side installed, but that they're going to install exactly the same. So we'll go ahead and go over to the passenger side and we can install that one together. So we want to grab our rails, and we're going to have a silver piece that has an oval hole on it that needs to go towards the cab and it needs to be on the inside of the rail, towards the center of the bed. Now, if you also look, there should be a sticker on each rail, it'll either have an L or an R. L, for the driver's side or the left side; R, for passenger or the right side. So we want to take our rail and we're going to sit it right on top of the side rail here. And then you want to slide it as far forward towards the cab as you can get.Now, it's not going to hold itself perfectly still, but it shouldn't hold itself in place well enough that you can at least grab one of the clamps, and we'll loosen up the nut. I don't really think it's necessary to completely remove it, we just want to loosen these up so we don't lose any of the pieces here and it's a little bit easier to handle. Now, you'll see that it's got little teeth on there, on each side of that clamp, those need to grab onto the rail.Now, if we look underneath and try to take your hand right on the bottom of that rail, it'll have some teeth, and that's what those teeth on the clamp are going to line up with. So we want to grab our clamp, push it as high as we can go, till it wraps underneath, grabs that panel and the rail, and sandwiches them together. The first one, we want to get as close to the front of the bed as we can. So we have this little kind of extended area right here. So that's going to prevent us from moving any further forward. So I'll just put my clamp loosely in place. We're going to make sure it goes as high as you can get it. Then I'm just going to tighten it up by hand for now, just to make sure that it's not going to move and my rail is going to hold itself up.We're going to have a total of three clamps per side so you want to space them out. The one in the middle, just somewhere in the general vicinity of the middle or the center section. And then the third clamp that's going to go towards the tailgate, you want to get it as close as you can to the tailgate. Now, again, depending on how the bed is shaped and what kind of liners you have, you may have to stop right about here. But again, you want it to be as far back as possible when you put it in place.And when you're putting your clamps in, again, you kind of want to double check the position of those teeth, make sure they're engaging and that it's all the way pushed up to the top of the rail. Next, we want to grab a 9/16 socket and you want to put downward pressure on the rail as you go back and tighten up the clamp. Now, I like to start at the front, so we'll start by our cab. We're going to tighten up that clamp and just work our way towards the back, tightening up each clamp along the way.At this point, we want to pull our cover out of the box and we want to find the small panel, it's going to be a lot smaller. This is going to be going towards the bulkhead. Now, you'll notice that we're going to have several holes on the back of it. Well, that's because we need to get our clip in place to hold it because we actually have a strap so that we can keep our cover open and not have to worry about that panel moving around.So we want to grab the clip out of our kit, along with two of these spacers and two screws. I'm going to take that spacer and coming from the bottom of the cover, so you want to make sure the seal's there, we'll pass it coming from the bottom going straight up, with both of those spacers. It may take a little bit of force to get them in place. And then we'll take our clip and take our screw, make sure it goes through the hole all the way on both sides. And real loosely, we'll just line it up and make sure everything is in place. Then we can either just take our finger and make sure it starts to couple threads. Make sure it's not cross threading and line up the screws. And then we can take a Phillips screwdriver and you may need to hold that Nutsert on the back to make sure it's not spinning. But then we can just run our screws in, tighten everything down, make sure those clips are nice and secure.Now, we're going to have this clip on each side. So as soon as we get this one in, we'll move to the other side and put that clip in as well. Just want to pay attention to the direction that the clips are going. You want the clip, the open end, to be facing away from the seal right here. I suggest getting an extra set of hands, but we want to put our cover on the rails and sitting in our truck bed. Now, that small panel that we used when we put those clips in place, we want to make sure that it's towards the cab of our truck here, and then when we fold it out, that seal here sits directly on the bulkhead of the bed here. Now, if we look at the very end, you should still have those large holes on each side.I'm going to grab the large bolt, it's to have a flat head on it, and we want to grab one of the rubber washers, slide the rubber washer over the bolt. And we want to make sure that when we look through, that hole is going through that slotted section on the rail when we first installed it. So we'll drop that bolt down through and do the same thing on the other side. So now that I come underneath the cover, you can see where that bolt came through and it is going through the bracket that's on the rail. Want to secure everything down. So we'll take another rubber washer, slide it over the bolt. And we'll take a metal flat washer, follow that up. And we'll take a split lock washer. And then finally, we're going to secure it using the turn knob. But right now, we just want to get it loosely in place, enough to hold everything, but you don't really want to crank on it too much because we may need to make some adjustments to make sure cover is nice and square on the bed.And whenever you're putting these in, you want to be careful because it's really easy to push these bolts back up to the top whenever you're trying to put the tun knob in. So if you can, I like to have my finger in place, kind of push against it, it'll trap that bolt from moving too much and hopefully make it a little bit easier to get those turn knobs and all those washers in place.Now that we have this side on, we're going to do the same thing on the other side. As you have those knobs tightened down, if you move to the outside right next to that knob, there's a little fitting on there. We want to grab our drain hose and that's going to slide right over that fitting. Now, obviously, we don't want all the water just to sit in the bed of the truck, kind of defeats the purpose of that drain tube. But we have this plug right at the back of the bed. So we can take a screwdriver, we'll pop that cover out. And then we can take our hose, we're just going to feed it down into the channel, inaudible 00:13:26 most of that excess goes straight down. Now, whenever it drains, it'll drain out of that tube and outside of the truck bed, so we can have a nice dry bed.Now, one thing I do want to mention, ours had the pro rods pre-installed on the rails. Most likely yours came from the factory like this. However, if they didn't, there is some instructions of how to put these on in the kit. So now that our cover's loosely in place, we're going to unfold it towards the tailgate, that way we can see if it's square and make any adjustments if we need to. It'll also allow us to take all this packaging material out, and that way we won't have to worry about our cover getting damaged.Now, when you're unfolding it, this is what you want. You want to leave yourself a little bit of a gap and drop it and see if it'll lock into place. Now, you can see that it's sitting on top of the tailgate here but it didn't really want to lock in at the very end. We can open our tailgate and look at our cover, see what kind of adjustments we need to make in order to get it to lock in place.Now, if you look at the very end here, there's a little white plastic tab that's going into this channel, that's what actually locks the cover in place. Now, we want to make sure that latch is fully engaged in that channel and it's not partially engaged, like this, because then we would need to make sure that the cover's centered. So if, for some reason, your cover's not latching on one side or one corner, you're going to want to loosen up those turn knobs up front and we can shift our cover from side to side to get it nice and square, that way when we we're unfolding it and folding it up, those latches fall right into those channels.Now, once you have your cover in place and you have those adjustments made, we'll come to the pull cord at the back, we're going to pull down, that'll allow us to fold our cover up. We want to fold it all the way back up to where we had it, to where those turn knobs were, so we can get underneath and really tighten them down and make sure the cover's not going to move on us.Now, I'm going to leave the cover about here because I don't want to fold it up quite yet and have it made contact with my truck. Now you want to tighten down the turn knobs that are on the bottom of the cover, so that it flattens out bed lock washer and it securely attaches the cover to that silver bracket underneath it. We'll do that on both sides. Now, obviously, if we want to fold our cover all the way up so we can have full bed access, you can already tell that the cover is going to make contact with our truck. Well, I don't really feel comfortable with driving down the road like that. And I know a lot of people won't either, but that's why they have provided us with this foam tape here. So that way it'll have a little bit of a cushion against our truck, so we don't have to worry about the cover banging against it.So what I like to do to make sure that it's actually going to be making contact in the correct spot, is I like to just very loosely kind of see where my cover would touch and then apply the tape to that spot. Now, this is going to work just like the bulkhead seal. So let's just peel the protective backing off and then we're going to stick it directly to the cover. And then we can always test fit it, kind of rotate that cover towards the cab. And already, it's preventing the cover from touching, but they do give us a total of three strips. So we'll put that one in the center and then one on each side, so we don't have to worry about any kind of scratches or dents on the back of our truck. Now, the final step is going to be unrolling the cover again and verifying that everything's still in line and sitting where we want it to. But that'll finish up your look at the BAK BAKFlip MX4 hard tonneau cover on our 2017 Chevrolet Silverado 1500.