DIY Camping Tailgate Extension Short Bed Tacoma

This is a DIY mod I did to my truck a couple years ago to make it so my GF and I could both camp in the back of my shortbed Tacoma with Soft Topper. It has since been removed from the truck due to now having a dedicated camper van, but still thought it may be helpful to some who want ideas for camping in their shortbeds.

I came up with this tailgate extension because I did not like any of the options I found on line at the time because they did not fit my specific needs (this was 2 years ago, so not sure if there is anything better on the market these days). The ones I found were not low profile / covert enough and seemed like a pain to set up.

I ended up building a collapsible foot extension that could be put up and taken down from inside the bed of the truck with the softtopper on. The way I built this was by taking two pieces of plywood and stapling waterproof canvas that I got from Amazon to the wood. I used hooks and snap buttons (the kind used on canvas boat covers) to secure the canvas to the tailgate. This worked really well actually and gave us both room to lay down and stretch out in the bed of the truck. As for sleeping surface we just used self inflating camping mats and sleeping bags. We did several weeks of camping this way and it worked very well overall. We used this in rain and did not have any issues with leaking.


Unfortunately I cant find any pictures of the entire setup in use, I deleted them off my phone by mistake. But I just went out to my garage and took some pictures of the foot extension part to better explain how it works.

PIC 1: Here is the extension all folded up. It only weighs about 5-10 pounds or so and folds up small enough to store easily.


PIC 2-3: Here is the extension unfolded and attached to the tailgate. It only takes maybe 30 seconds to unfold and attach. Super easy.


PIC 4: Here is me laying stretched out in the bed, with plenty of room for my feet (Pardon the awesome pajama pants). I am 6'01" and there is plenty of room. My GF is 5'08" and there is room for both of us to fit easily.

PIC 5: Here is a picture of the inside, you can see how I just stapled the canvas to the plywood. The staples don't look very nice when you look at it up close but they work perfectly fine. I also put some seam sealer that came with my softtopper over all the exterior staples to better water proof everything. You will notice a small gap between the edge of the extension and the bed. To fill this we just wedged our sleeping bag cases in there, I'm sure someone else could come up with a more elegant solution though.


PIC 6: I used these button snaps to attach the canvas to the inside cross rail that comes with the soft topper. I just had to add a screw in mounting snap onto that cross rail. (sorry I don't have a picture of that because I took my softtopper off the truck recently).



PIC 7: I put a snap that connects the canvas to each corner of the tailgate.



PIC 8: I bent some thin scrap metal to function as a hook over the tailgate latch. This is the main mounting point, all the snaps are secondary.


Basically the way I would set this up when camping is
1) We would crawl into the bed of the truck with the softtopper all closed up.
2) Unfold the extension.
3) Place the hooks on.
4) Reach through the gap to attach the snaps to the tail gate.
5) Attach the snaps to the softtopper cross support beam.
To get out of the truck in the morning we would just reverse the process.

I wish I still had the pictures of everything all together so I could explain this better, but hopefully it all makes sense anyways. I am sure if you were to make this you could make it look much nicer than I did. I was just using this essentially as a quick build prototype to see how I liked it, and I feel like it was the best solution for us camping in the shortbed as it is covert enough that you can camp places like a Walmart parking lot if needed, because it looks almost like an extension of the softtopper.

Here is a picture with the topper from one trip I found, unfortunately the extension is not put on here, but it even worked with the bike rack and everything.


I know this is not the best post because I don't have the best pictures to explain the build, but hope it still can help anyone looking for some different ideas.​

 

Oh man I like that a lot.

 

Super sick dude!

 

Nice ! I like it