The Project: A Personalized Tailgate Latch System

As I embarked on this project, I must admit that I was both excited and apprehensive about the prospect of customizing my vehicle's tailgate. The task seemed daunting at first, but as I delved deeper into the process, I discovered that it was actually quite manageable. My goal was to create a latch system that would securely attach a small wooden door to the tailgate, providing easy access to storage compartments.

To begin, I needed to determine the correct size and shape of the latch and its corresponding spacers. The original design called for a custom-made latch with specific dimensions, but I soon realized that this would be a time-consuming and costly endeavor. Instead, I opted for a simpler approach, using pre-made parts from a hardware store. However, I quickly encountered a new challenge: the material I had chosen was thinner than expected, which meant that it wouldn't fit snugly into the latch's recesses.

To overcome this issue, I used two active spacers to fill the gap between the latch and the tailgate. These spacers were designed specifically for this application and would provide a secure fit without compromising the overall aesthetic of the system. While they may not be aesthetically pleasing on their own, these spacers proved to be essential in ensuring a smooth operation of the latch.

As I continued working on the project, I encountered another problem: the rivets used to attach the latch to the tailgate were too short to accommodate the desired level of spacing. In response, I switched to longer bolts and added nuts to provide additional security. This modification proved to be effective, but it also highlighted the importance of careful planning and attention to detail.

One critical aspect of the project involved ensuring that the latch would function reliably in a variety of environments. To address this concern, I decided to add some Loctite to the system, which would help to prevent the bolts from coming loose due to vibration or other external forces. This precautionary measure proved to be wise, as the vehicle's movements did indeed cause the bolts to loosen over time.

To further enhance the functionality of the latch, I added some EBA foam floor mats to reduce noise and minimize the impact of metal straps or tools bouncing around inside the tailgate. By cutting these mats to fit snugly into place and securing them with spray adhesive, I achieved a level of quiet and refinement that exceeded my expectations.

Throughout the project, I encountered several unexpected challenges, including the warping of the PVC board in hot sunlight. While this material proved to be suitable for most applications, its susceptibility to thermal expansion made it less-than-ideal for this particular task. Fortunately, this setback was easily overcome by using a thicker piece of material as a template and adjusting the design accordingly.

As I worked through the project, I began to appreciate the value of experimentation and adaptability. By trying different materials, spacers, and attachment methods, I was able to refine the system and address any issues that arose during testing. This process ultimately led to a successful outcome, with the latch functioning smoothly and reliably in all scenarios.

In conclusion, this project taught me valuable lessons about patience, perseverance, and creative problem-solving. By embracing uncertainty and being open to new ideas, I was able to overcome the challenges that arose during the design and implementation of my personalized tailgate latch system.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey I'm Bob it I like to make stuff today I'm gonna cut a hole in my tailgate and add some story a couple of years ago I made a big storage unit that fit in the back of my Land Cruisers so I could hold tools and supplies and whatever else I needed I didn't end up using it very much and I took it out when we moved but I still need to have some storage in the back of this thing so when I was looking around on some of the forums I found where people will take off the cover on the back of their tailgate and put storage in there so we're gonna do that so the first thing we're gonna do is pop out this panel just just held in by some plastic little rivets now we're gonna figure out what you cut out so it's mostly empty in here there's not much in there at all there's a few things here for the latch but I think we can cut away this top section and then just work around those pieces there's a lot of depth over here like in the corners and that would be good but the stuff goes all the way across the top so the whole top sections not going to be that usable after looking around at this a little bit more I kind of changed my plan the original idea was to cut out as much of this as possible and have one big cavity and then one big door but I think I've changed that you don't want to cut out everything because part of the strength of the tailgate is these ridges that are in the surface and there's also some stuff on the insides and structural members so we don't want to get rid of those I'm still going to cover the whole thing with one big surface but I think I'm only going to cut out these areas on the ends they're deep enough that I could put in a tool or a bunch of straps or whatever I need to and still keep the structural integrity of the tailgate I drew out the shape that I wanted to cut away on one side and then measured out some key points to translate that same shape to the other side of the tailgate once I had them both drawn out I got out the angle grinder I found it was best to really lightly go over my sharpie lines and make a score not try to make a deep cut the cut ends up being cleaner although it takes more passes and a little bit longer to do I also made sure to go right up to the corners but try not to go through them just to have a cleaner corner look and this tool works great for cutting in straight lines or even big sweeping curves but the curves in the corner just wouldn't look good I tried to do it with an angle grinder for the corners the angle grinder is not really going to work very well so I'm going to use a jigsaw and if you don't have an angle grinder you could do the whole thing with a normal jigsaw blade that's made for multi-material now it's not going to be as clean of a cut but it would definitely work this video is sponsored by energizer and I wanted to show you their new vision HD+ focus headlamp this is one of the things I keep in the console of my car along with some matches and paracord just in case there's an emergency I've got the basic stuff I need these things are really handy in case you need to work under a car change a tire at night or if you want to work in a dark place like an attic it's great to have some hands-free lighting while you work this has 5 different lighting modes that you can flip through and it's got a button to help you focus the beam so you can go from a tight spot all the way to a full floodlight these are really handy to have around they're comfortable and durable if you want to find out more about these click the link down in the description thanks energiser alright so this already shows me that I have enough space to be able to put some tools in there and put a cover over them that's pretty awesome all right got the panel's cut out and I think that's as much as I'm going to cut out on here I don't want to mess with the inside here so the next step is to clean up these cuts they're really rough so we're gonna have to get some files some flat disks clean them up and then probably go back and prevent rust by painting the inside of this I don't know if we're gonna paint the whole thing yet and not sure but we got to clean up before we can do anything else I don't know a whole lot about using files but I do have a couple of old flat ones that seem to work pretty well I made sure to file on the inside and on the outside of each one of these cuts and after a little bit of work it ended up being pretty smooth and pretty easy to touch the big worry here was that I would have a sharp edge that would cut my hand if I was trying to get something in or out of these compartments I've got the edge of that's pretty clean and I'm gonna stop working on it for today but I don't want there exposed edges to rust so I'm going to spray some rust inhibitor just on that exposed metal edge just to kind of preserve it you could also just put a coat of spray paint that would do it temporarily you'll just have to clean it off there to make the cover for the tailgate I ordered this sheet of foam PVC this is often used for signs so it's kind of flexible pretty durable should work out pretty well I got this from tap plastics and you can give them specific measurements they'll cut it to size and send it to you so I got it a little bit oversized we're going to take it out there and trace the shape so I can knock off the corners and make it fit perfectly I tried a couple of different things to get the radius around the corners and it ended up that a paint can was pretty close so I pushed that all the way to the corners and traced it and then cut out that area with the jigsaw this stuff cuts super easy you could probably just do it with a utility knife and get a pretty good result after I got these corners knocked off I smooth out the transitions with the sander and to turn this piece into a door I used a piano hinge also known as a continuous hinge this one was four feet long which was a little bit longer than I needed I laid it in place marked the length that I wanted and then cut that off with the Dremel I got this hymn centered on the bottom of the door and used some clamps to hold it in place then I drilled some holes through the top side and added some small rivets you could use screws here but I was kind of afraid that they would get stripped out of this plastic because it's so soft the rivets actually worked really well to hold the hinge in place back in the vehicle I took my time to make sure that this was in the right place and it was running parallel to the cuts that I made and after I was happy with the placement again I clamped it down and drilled some holes the rivets worked great here as well in the sheet mode now it's time to put in some latches so that you can keep this thing locked in place I got these marine latches and they have a little hook here and when you pull that up it pulls the hook back so this should work the only problem here is that the gap that it's expecting for the material is bigger than the material that I use for this so we're gonna have to fill that in we also have this little piece that needs to hook down there somewhere for this thing to catch on so we got to figure out the placement I use the chalk marker to make a mark where I wanted the catch to be then press the door down onto that and it transferred up on to the bottom of the door I did this on both sides and then scored that to make sure I knew where that placement was after that I did some experiments and some measuring to try to figure out the scraps that I needed to put in place to make sure that everything would line up correctly after getting my measurements figured out I used that score line as a reference point to draw the center of the hole at that center point I drilled a small pilot hole and then from that I drilled a larger hole I used a Forstner bit for this because it needed to be 2 and 1/8 inches I went ahead and drilled from the top side just in case there was any tear-out I wanted to hide it while I was getting these holes prepared Josh designed a couple of small rings and cut them out on the laser cutter two active spacers these fit right underneath to make up the difference in thickness that this latch was expected but they're just spacers so you could totally cut these out of any material and use any scroll saw or jig saw to make them this material is thinner than what the latch is expecting so we had to put in some spacers we also have to put in the spacer underneath the catch and since this is inside and we can only tell if it works if it's closed this is kind of hard to do so I'm going to cut down some scraps and use some CA glue to test it out that's good as we're out here working in the hot I can tell that this PVC board is actually flexing a little bit when it sits in the hot Sun so this may not be the optimal material to use for this but even if it doesn't work here I can always knock this piece out and use it as a template on something else you could certainly use a piece of wood I just wanted to use plastic cause I thought it would be more resilient but if it ends up messing up I'll just rip this one off and replace it with something harder experimenting with some different spacers mostly using the same material that I was using for the door I drilled the matching holes and drilled holes down into the sheet metal where everything would connect I tried several different variations of this and planned on using rivets and then I realized that the rivets weren't long enough to go through all of the spacers that I needed I ended up getting some longer bolts and running those through and adding nuts to the bottom solder this worked pretty well but the spacers I was using weren't quite right still I found that a quarter 20 nut ended up being the perfect sized spacer it latched perfectly in place and held the door all the way against the tailgate once I had one of these figured out the second side was super fast and super easy to do one thing I still need to do is go back and add some Loctite to these the vibration of the vehicle bouncing around is probably gonna make these come loose now I'm just going to throw some random stuff in here open it close it a few times to make sure that the door stays in place while it's moving they use some degreaser to clean off all the surfaces both on the top and down on the inside of these before adding some foam I wanted to cut down on the noise of any metal straps or tools bouncing around in here so I cut some EBA foam floor mats to put in I cut them as big as I possibly could and force them into place and then peeled up each corner and added spray adhesive I cut these pieces well oversized and went back and trimmed out anything that was in the way it did have to cut out a lot of stuff at the top to make sure that the latch could freely move so that the tailgate could lock into place the white paint was still in pretty good shape so I decided not to paint the inside of the tailgate and I used some acetone to remove those extra Sharpie marks from before and after that was done this thing was finished so it turns out that this project was actually a lot easier than I expected the big scary part was cutting into the vehicle which of course is terrifying but in this case it's not a structural thing on the car it's something that could be reweld it if I absolutely had to and even that's a scary thing it's pretty cool to take something that you enjoy and customize it to make it your own like I pointed out before if this material ends up warping or not being something that lasts a long time I can pull it off and use it as a template to cut a thicker piece of material to put in here and if that material is a different thickness I can just add more spacers here to make up the difference so I'm curious about something from you guys do you have a project like this that you're worried about starting because it may end up being a disaster are you scared about taking that first step let me know down in the comments because I would love to hear about those things luckily for me jumping in and cutting a hole in my vehicle worked out pretty well I'd love to know what you think about this project and if you've done something like this and you have some more suggestions or other ideas let me know down in the comments I've got lots of other types of projects that you may be interested in check out some of those videos and don't forget to subscribe that's it for this week guys thanks for watching we'll see you next time because this material is thinner than what this bracket just Blatch it says we have to put a spacer underneath and we have to put a spacer underneath under nare oh I know is it Barthey I'm Bob it I like to make stuff today I'm gonna cut a hole in my tailgate and add some story a couple of years ago I made a big storage unit that fit in the back of my Land Cruisers so I could hold tools and supplies and whatever else I needed I didn't end up using it very much and I took it out when we moved but I still need to have some storage in the back of this thing so when I was looking around on some of the forums I found where people will take off the cover on the back of their tailgate and put storage in there so we're gonna do that so the first thing we're gonna do is pop out this panel just just held in by some plastic little rivets now we're gonna figure out what you cut out so it's mostly empty in here there's not much in there at all there's a few things here for the latch but I think we can cut away this top section and then just work around those pieces there's a lot of depth over here like in the corners and that would be good but the stuff goes all the way across the top so the whole top sections not going to be that usable after looking around at this a little bit more I kind of changed my plan the original idea was to cut out as much of this as possible and have one big cavity and then one big door but I think I've changed that you don't want to cut out everything because part of the strength of the tailgate is these ridges that are in the surface and there's also some stuff on the insides and structural members so we don't want to get rid of those I'm still going to cover the whole thing with one big surface but I think I'm only going to cut out these areas on the ends they're deep enough that I could put in a tool or a bunch of straps or whatever I need to and still keep the structural integrity of the tailgate I drew out the shape that I wanted to cut away on one side and then measured out some key points to translate that same shape to the other side of the tailgate once I had them both drawn out I got out the angle grinder I found it was best to really lightly go over my sharpie lines and make a score not try to make a deep cut the cut ends up being cleaner although it takes more passes and a little bit longer to do I also made sure to go right up to the corners but try not to go through them just to have a cleaner corner look and this tool works great for cutting in straight lines or even big sweeping curves but the curves in the corner just wouldn't look good I tried to do it with an angle grinder for the corners the angle grinder is not really going to work very well so I'm going to use a jigsaw and if you don't have an angle grinder you could do the whole thing with a normal jigsaw blade that's made for multi-material now it's not going to be as clean of a cut but it would definitely work this video is sponsored by energizer and I wanted to show you their new vision HD+ focus headlamp this is one of the things I keep in the console of my car along with some matches and paracord just in case there's an emergency I've got the basic stuff I need these things are really handy in case you need to work under a car change a tire at night or if you want to work in a dark place like an attic it's great to have some hands-free lighting while you work this has 5 different lighting modes that you can flip through and it's got a button to help you focus the beam so you can go from a tight spot all the way to a full floodlight these are really handy to have around they're comfortable and durable if you want to find out more about these click the link down in the description thanks energiser alright so this already shows me that I have enough space to be able to put some tools in there and put a cover over them that's pretty awesome all right got the panel's cut out and I think that's as much as I'm going to cut out on here I don't want to mess with the inside here so the next step is to clean up these cuts they're really rough so we're gonna have to get some files some flat disks clean them up and then probably go back and prevent rust by painting the inside of this I don't know if we're gonna paint the whole thing yet and not sure but we got to clean up before we can do anything else I don't know a whole lot about using files but I do have a couple of old flat ones that seem to work pretty well I made sure to file on the inside and on the outside of each one of these cuts and after a little bit of work it ended up being pretty smooth and pretty easy to touch the big worry here was that I would have a sharp edge that would cut my hand if I was trying to get something in or out of these compartments I've got the edge of that's pretty clean and I'm gonna stop working on it for today but I don't want there exposed edges to rust so I'm going to spray some rust inhibitor just on that exposed metal edge just to kind of preserve it you could also just put a coat of spray paint that would do it temporarily you'll just have to clean it off there to make the cover for the tailgate I ordered this sheet of foam PVC this is often used for signs so it's kind of flexible pretty durable should work out pretty well I got this from tap plastics and you can give them specific measurements they'll cut it to size and send it to you so I got it a little bit oversized we're going to take it out there and trace the shape so I can knock off the corners and make it fit perfectly I tried a couple of different things to get the radius around the corners and it ended up that a paint can was pretty close so I pushed that all the way to the corners and traced it and then cut out that area with the jigsaw this stuff cuts super easy you could probably just do it with a utility knife and get a pretty good result after I got these corners knocked off I smooth out the transitions with the sander and to turn this piece into a door I used a piano hinge also known as a continuous hinge this one was four feet long which was a little bit longer than I needed I laid it in place marked the length that I wanted and then cut that off with the Dremel I got this hymn centered on the bottom of the door and used some clamps to hold it in place then I drilled some holes through the top side and added some small rivets you could use screws here but I was kind of afraid that they would get stripped out of this plastic because it's so soft the rivets actually worked really well to hold the hinge in place back in the vehicle I took my time to make sure that this was in the right place and it was running parallel to the cuts that I made and after I was happy with the placement again I clamped it down and drilled some holes the rivets worked great here as well in the sheet mode now it's time to put in some latches so that you can keep this thing locked in place I got these marine latches and they have a little hook here and when you pull that up it pulls the hook back so this should work the only problem here is that the gap that it's expecting for the material is bigger than the material that I use for this so we're gonna have to fill that in we also have this little piece that needs to hook down there somewhere for this thing to catch on so we got to figure out the placement I use the chalk marker to make a mark where I wanted the catch to be then press the door down onto that and it transferred up on to the bottom of the door I did this on both sides and then scored that to make sure I knew where that placement was after that I did some experiments and some measuring to try to figure out the scraps that I needed to put in place to make sure that everything would line up correctly after getting my measurements figured out I used that score line as a reference point to draw the center of the hole at that center point I drilled a small pilot hole and then from that I drilled a larger hole I used a Forstner bit for this because it needed to be 2 and 1/8 inches I went ahead and drilled from the top side just in case there was any tear-out I wanted to hide it while I was getting these holes prepared Josh designed a couple of small rings and cut them out on the laser cutter two active spacers these fit right underneath to make up the difference in thickness that this latch was expected but they're just spacers so you could totally cut these out of any material and use any scroll saw or jig saw to make them this material is thinner than what the latch is expecting so we had to put in some spacers we also have to put in the spacer underneath the catch and since this is inside and we can only tell if it works if it's closed this is kind of hard to do so I'm going to cut down some scraps and use some CA glue to test it out that's good as we're out here working in the hot I can tell that this PVC board is actually flexing a little bit when it sits in the hot Sun so this may not be the optimal material to use for this but even if it doesn't work here I can always knock this piece out and use it as a template on something else you could certainly use a piece of wood I just wanted to use plastic cause I thought it would be more resilient but if it ends up messing up I'll just rip this one off and replace it with something harder experimenting with some different spacers mostly using the same material that I was using for the door I drilled the matching holes and drilled holes down into the sheet metal where everything would connect I tried several different variations of this and planned on using rivets and then I realized that the rivets weren't long enough to go through all of the spacers that I needed I ended up getting some longer bolts and running those through and adding nuts to the bottom solder this worked pretty well but the spacers I was using weren't quite right still I found that a quarter 20 nut ended up being the perfect sized spacer it latched perfectly in place and held the door all the way against the tailgate once I had one of these figured out the second side was super fast and super easy to do one thing I still need to do is go back and add some Loctite to these the vibration of the vehicle bouncing around is probably gonna make these come loose now I'm just going to throw some random stuff in here open it close it a few times to make sure that the door stays in place while it's moving they use some degreaser to clean off all the surfaces both on the top and down on the inside of these before adding some foam I wanted to cut down on the noise of any metal straps or tools bouncing around in here so I cut some EBA foam floor mats to put in I cut them as big as I possibly could and force them into place and then peeled up each corner and added spray adhesive I cut these pieces well oversized and went back and trimmed out anything that was in the way it did have to cut out a lot of stuff at the top to make sure that the latch could freely move so that the tailgate could lock into place the white paint was still in pretty good shape so I decided not to paint the inside of the tailgate and I used some acetone to remove those extra Sharpie marks from before and after that was done this thing was finished so it turns out that this project was actually a lot easier than I expected the big scary part was cutting into the vehicle which of course is terrifying but in this case it's not a structural thing on the car it's something that could be reweld it if I absolutely had to and even that's a scary thing it's pretty cool to take something that you enjoy and customize it to make it your own like I pointed out before if this material ends up warping or not being something that lasts a long time I can pull it off and use it as a template to cut a thicker piece of material to put in here and if that material is a different thickness I can just add more spacers here to make up the difference so I'm curious about something from you guys do you have a project like this that you're worried about starting because it may end up being a disaster are you scared about taking that first step let me know down in the comments because I would love to hear about those things luckily for me jumping in and cutting a hole in my vehicle worked out pretty well I'd love to know what you think about this project and if you've done something like this and you have some more suggestions or other ideas let me know down in the comments I've got lots of other types of projects that you may be interested in check out some of those videos and don't forget to subscribe that's it for this week guys thanks for watching we'll see you next time because this material is thinner than what this bracket just Blatch it says we have to put a spacer underneath and we have to put a spacer underneath under nare oh I know is it Bart\n"