If you’ve ever bought a tonneau cover or truck bed toolbox to protect your pick up truck contents from weather, water, road salt and dust, how did it do?
Did it live up to the brand’s promises of protecting your truck bed?
At Stowe Cargo, many breakthrough design innovations, like our patented 2-in-1 tonneau cover with a built in toolbox/cargo system, give your pickup the most weathertight truck bed protection you can find.
There’s a big difference between general cargo, which can be stored in the truck bed, and tools and gear that need to be handled more carefully and better protected from vandals and the weather. No tonneau cover alone can do this! That’s why Stowe Cargo designed our tonneau cover complete with a built-in toolbox that is multipurpose—to secure your more sensitive gear and better organize your truck bed.
This is especially important because the air under many tonneau covers is filled with moisture, road salt and dust. These contaminants can soil and even corrode your tools and whatever else you’re carrying in your truck bed. Our tonneau cover’s built-in toolbox overcomes this vulnerability by providing a securely sealed and dependable storage environment—a clean and secure space for your most important tools and gear.
The key to effective toolbox and truck bed cover sealing is seal compression. The more uniform and controlled the compression, the better the cover is sealed. Stowe’s high performance, factory-grade sealing system is based on a custom two-stage design, where a secondary perimeter seal backs up the primary seal, for a true weathertight seal and the most waterproof protection in all conditions.
In fact, the Stowe Cargo cover seal technology is even more advanced than what the Original Equipment Manufacturers trust to weatherproof your pick-up’s doors!
The Stowe system is designed to be weathertight not simply water resistant; water, dust, moisture and road salt just won’t get in—period. The toolbox is a sealed and secure storage environment. Its top cover is equipped with the same, custom double-bulb perimeter seal that provides extraordinary protection.
On a cool evening after a hot, humid day, when the hot air cools, the inside walls of your typical aluminum toolbox will condense with added moisture. The space-age composite construction of Stowe’s tonneau cover/toolbox combo helps protect your truck bed from this added water damage.
The Stowe tonneau cover is equipped with the same perimeter seal design as the toolbox cover, providing the most waterproof and weathertight seal for your entire truck bed.
When it came to maintaining the waterproof characteristics of Stowe’s high performance urethane double-bulb seal, Stowe had to ensure that the cover panel seals would last as long as you owned your pick-up truck. We engineered a unique process of applying a waterproof, anti-stick coating so that there would be no friction between the cover’s seal and the bed rail. In order to get the best seal and extended life, Stowe chose not to use the industry standard inexpensive foam seals, which deteriorate over time from this type of cover friction. With inferior foam seals, most tonneau covers leak within a short period of time after installation. In fact, most truck owners see water intrusion within the first year from foam seal failures.
Yes, you can call it a truck bed “toolbox.” But it’s also a strongbox, a big boy’s toy box, a tacklebox, you name it. It’s a sleek, sophisticated, generous 400-lb.-capacity storage compartment that’s tall enough for a five-gallon pail and long enough for a set of golf clubs. It’ll help you organize your pick up truck bed, has available dividers, and even makes a great ice cooler.
Most important, unlike makeshift DIY toolbox-plus-tonneau mash-ups, our unique 2-in-1 toolbox-and-tonneau system is a single integrated design, with both toolbox and tonneau cover truly weathertight and secure. Use them together, or easily remove the tonneau cover when you need to carry taller loads.
Why buy a tool-box to go under your tonneau cover? With the Stowe 2-in-1 tonneau cover and toolbox system, your toolbox is fully accessible and weather tight with its own locking cover. It’s higher-tech protection for your tools and gear.
The Stowe 2-in-1 tonneau cover and toolbox cover panels are highly-engineered and the most advanced cover technology in the industry. One of the safety measures we took when building the cover panels was to not only mitigate the entrance of water into the panel itself, but if so, stop the water, and its ability to cause any harm to the cover in terms of delamination, deterioration or failures that would further hinder its ability to remain weathertight. Our panel covers use advanced automotive grade closed cell technology in the core that simply won’t allow water penetration even when faced with moisture. One of the biggest challenges with current tonneau covers is they use open cell, off the shelf foam. For those covers the open cell foam is a critical point of failure. If that gets wet, it swells and delaminates the cover, thus destroying the water-resistant seal, instant leaks forever. We have all seen these covers in the parking lot, they are bulging, lifting up at the corners, and look like hell. Imagine what the stuff inside looks like!
Our cover panels are fully encapsulated and wrapped using advanced materials and water proofing surface treatments. Many cover systems use the rail system to protect the cover from water penetration, relying on water routing channels to move the water away from the edges and seams, but these channels are easily inundated and overrun with water volume during the smallest of rainstorms, thus exposing weak points at the edges of the covers and seams for water to penetrate and saturate the foam core. At Stowe we merely encapsulated the cover so the core can’t be penetrated, but if it were to be, it is faced with an impenetrable wall of advanced closed cell material.