Homemade Custom Toolboxes

[mfennema]

So I decided that I wanted some room to store things in my truck and I was tired of having everything laying around on the floor under the back seat. What I needed was a toolbox, but I have a roll up tonneau cover on my bed, so that would mean I'd have to get a chest type and that would mean very very little bed space so that wasn't going to work. I decided that maybe the swingcase would be a good idea.

 

 

After looking at these for a while and realizing that they were way more money than I really wanted to spend, and that I didn't like the the fact that it was plastic, I decided that I could find some diamond plate and weld up a simple box that would mount somewhat like the swingcase does and would fit under my cover. I mentioned to my parents that I was thinking of taking on this project just in passing and they took this idea and stuck gold for me.

 

They were out at a yardsale one day and found a set of over the rail toolboxes (I'll explain about the cover in a minute) that were in pretty good shape and the guy wanted a hundred bucks for the set. These things sell for much more than that new, but my parents (being the frugal people they are) decided that they weren't worth a hundred and offered sixty. I guess they guy didn't have any one that had even been sniffing these boxes so he jumped at the chance to have them gone and took the offer. This is what the boxes looked like when I got them.

 

 

I have a good buddy that is very very good with body and metal work and just so happens to have a tig welder, so I enlisted his help. We looked at these boxes and removed the legs and decided that we had just enough room to turn them sideways and and get them to fit under my cover but above the wheel well. We decided that with them being so deep they would stick too far into the bed of the truck and take up too much room in the box. We cut off the bottom plate of the boxes and then cut off about 3 more inches of the bottom. After this was all removed, we tacked the bottom plate back on and did a test fit. We ran into an issue where the box would hit the wheel well just a little bit and would actually push the box up too high and it would get into the cover. My buddy had a solution for this, and made a cut out in the box to go over the wheel well.

 

 

Once this was all done, we test fit the box again and it fit like a glove. The next step was to figure out how to mount the boxes on the bed and this is when I started looking into how the cargo management system was attached. I noticed that some guys were using nuts that are used for U channel because you could slip them through the hole and then turn them and make them grab. I tried this, but wasn't impressed with the way it worked so I just went back to some standard hardware. I found some pieces of 1/2" X 6" all thread at Lowe's and bought 6 of them along with 12 stop nuts, 6 regular nuts, 12 2-inch washers, 6 lock washers, and 18 1-inch washers. I put one of the stop nuts on one end of the all thread (I could have used bolts I suppose, but I couldn't find anyone that were long enough and threaded all the way up) so that a few threads were showing past the nut then I slipped on a 1" washer and a 2" washer and then I could slip these through the slot. I slipped on another 2" washer, a 1" washer, lock washer, and regular nut. This allowed me to, in essence, clamp the bolt to the bed side with about 5 inches sticking into the bed. This allowed me to drill some holes in the "lip" of the boxes which the bolts would fit into and then I could put on another washer and stop nut. For a little support, we welded some 2" aluminum tubing onto the boxes so that the bolts would go through the tubing and then into the box. This allowed to torque the boxes down and the tubing would not allow the box to just bend and it made the whole setup more stable.

 

(Sorry I don't have any pictures of this)

 

After this was all done, it put the boxes in and they fit great, but I wasn't impressed with them because the diamond plate was dull and looked pretty gross. So then I decided that I would paint them black and make them look better. First I removed all of the hardware that was possible to remove. This included the handles, latches and mechanisms inside, and I even drilled out the rivets that held the lid to the box. I used a red SOS pad to scuff up the diamond plate and then sprayed it with self-etching primer. I then put on a coat of filler primer, and then two coats of flat black and two coats of clear on all of the diamond plate. After all of that was done and dried, and I got all of the hardware cleaned up, I used some aluminum rivets to put it all back together again. Check out the pictures of the final product mounted in the truck below.

 

 

After all of this was done, I had the terrible realization that my bed lights (see the link in my sig) were now hidden behind the boxes and were no longer lighting up the bed. So I pulled them down and put them on the bottom of the boxes and got them all wired up using some Deutsch connectors and got everything working. I then decided that it would be nice to have some lights inside the boxes too for when I'm looking for something at night so I added some here as well. This is how they look in the dark (the camera doesn't show how much light is actually there).

 

Boxes Closed

Boxes Open

 

In the end, I am very very happy with the way they turned out and I am sure to get a lot of use out of them in the future.

 

(Just for info, I still have about 45" of clearance between the boxes, and there is still plenty room below them to put a full sheet of plywood.

 

After all of that mouthful, let me know what you guys think. If you have any questions or suggestions, I'm always open for improvement.

 

Thanks for checkin it out!

[Black02Silverado]

[ryan_hermanutz]

Pretty sweet man!

[asilverblazer]

Thats makes me exhausted looking at all that work.

 

Which is a lot more than I would do.

[GasHog369]

That looks amazing!

[RyanbabZ71]

looks great!

[hockeypro1411]

WOW! That looks pretty sweet! Good idea with the lights, too!

[MarkD]

Looks Great!

 

+1 on the work...top notch!

[Harvey Halabookie]

 

[grayghost7]

Nicely done....I like the stealth of the boxes!!

[Daryl LBZ]

Thats a really good idea! Looks really good too.

[TexasAl]

Wow, that is spectacular. This is really a great way to have a lot of storage, not loose too much bed space. Congrats!

[mfennema]

Thanks for all of the comments everyone!

[blackout07]

I like it. Nice work.

[Zembonez]

Great idea and it looks like it turned out very nice as well!