Emily

Evening, Peeps.

Today I have a brief mention about LINE-X.

When I ordered my truck, Dee, I went down the options list like a kid in a candy store and checked every box they had. The only boxes I couldn’t check were ones that conflicted with other options…and when the sales manager took my pen away. Among these choices are the LINE-X spray-in bed liner. For those of you not in the know, LINE-X is a plastic-like resin you can have sprayed on your truck bed to protect it from damage.

LINE-X’s primary advantage is supposed to be that it doesn’t trap water like the drop-in liners do, and it’s supposed to be pretty indestructible. This stuff has such a good reputation people cover their entire vehicle with it.

I mention this because this is what my LINE-X looked like not long after I bought the truck.

That little beauty was caused by a plastic dog fence that, evidently, rubbed on the bed during a tow in Florida. Not, you know, by bricks, steel rods, boulders….piles of aggregate dramatically dropped in by a front-end loader.

As annoying as this was, I also noticed another blemish.

That discoloration was caused by running our generator with the exhaust too close to the sides. I kind of suck, I wasn’t paying attention.

Repair

Monday Dee’s going in for a new coat of LINE-X. After showing this stuff to the local Chevy Dealer they seemed fairly unimpressed. Considering Dee is under warranty I wasn’t entirely sure what they’d say. Admittedly baking your LINE-X with a generator is not cool (literally), so I could see that being outside the warranty parameters.

But suffering under the ravages of a vicious small plastic dog fence? Now that’s just low.

The verdict? The dealer saw their way clear to re-doing the LINE-X with a new coat for the low low price of $375. That’s down from the sticker-shock price of $450. Draw your own conclusions.

Recommendation

After self-actualizing for a while my conclusion is I still give LINE-X a thumbs up. Our truck has done a hell of a lot of towing in her short life and already carried bursting bed-loads of stuff all over the country including a 300lb (136 kg) generator, leaking gasoline cans, bikes, toolboxes, compressors and an embarrassing array of RV accouterments. With that kind of duty, I suppose one scratch isn’t too bad. Considering the LINE-X got baked by a generator, that’s really not bad.

That said, anyone will tell you I don’t trust anything. I feel like these days, even very expensive stuff is cheap. That’s why even though I have LINE-X in my pickup bed I doubled down with rubber anti-fatigue mats from Costco before our trip. They’ve looked like this for over two years.

I suspect this might be why I have damage on the sides of the bed but not the bottom. I stand by my choice. LINE-X – yes. Additional rubber mats – yes.