On my ole F250, I had welded four metal hook things to each side of the bed, on the outer edge, with the open end pointing down. This worked great, and I was thinking of doing it to this machine too, but they were a little "aggressive" if you walked too close to it. The reason I used "hooks" and not "eyes" is that in reality, we often find ourselves tying down a loose load with a long piece of rope, going back and forth and all around. When undoing it, if you use hooks, all you have to do is loosen the rope a bit and it can pulled off the hooks and cast aside out of the way. With eyes, you have to thread all that rope back out through them (and had to thread it through to tie things down, too). But this time I decided to work with things I could buy, if they were cheap and easy. They were. My local hardware store had a couple (I'll pick up two more later) of thingies that were big rubber blocks, with an eyebolt running through them and a chrome trim piece that had rubber under it, to a threaded plate on the bottom. These fit right into the bed's stake holes, and you tighten the eyebolt to compress the rubber, which makes it fatter and holds it in place. They were about five bucks each. Before I installed them, I took an S-hook and closed one end around the eyebolt in my vise. Now I have hooks and eyes.  The plastic cap things on the hooks are my first attempt to minimize scratching and rattling, I might try sliding some thin hose over the whole hook part. These will be in the rear and middle (over axle) stake holes. At the front will be some sort of custom homemade junkyard fancy schmancy window guard & auxiliary light holder, so I will build a couple of tie down hooks into it. |
