Bed

The Bed

The bed is the storage system that sits on the sub-frame — what we call the garage. It carries every piece of gear the truck lives with, forms the shell the camper platform sits on, and is the part of the build a stranger sees first and the owner touches every day.

This page is the brief for the shop building the forward garage module: the philosophy behind it, and the requirements every storage module must meet.

Philosophy

A storage module has to earn two kinds of trust. It has to look and feel considered — because it is the face of the truck — and it has to be genuinely hard to break into, because it holds everything that matters on the road.

We buy security with geometry before electronics. The best lock is a door edge a pry bar cannot find, a rivet a drill cannot reach, a gap too tight to admit a blade. Hardware is the last line of defence, not the first.

We build the way kit aircraft are built — chemically bonded and riveted assemblies, tight and repeatable tolerances, parts pre-formed to go together one way and the right way. A competent shop should assemble a module predictably from a kit, and a builder should be able to service it years later without cutting it apart.

And we finish to last: a sealed, weatherproof aluminium shell under a durable powder coat, priced so the design is something people actually build.

Requirements

Every storage module in the bed — the forward garage first — meets all of the following.

Weatherproofing

• Fully weatherproof — sealed against driving rain, dust, and wash-down ingress
• Sealed door perimeters; no standing water retained in any compartment

Design & finish

• Beautifully designed and genuinely practical — form serves access, sightlines, and daily use
• Powder coated for a durable, uniform finish

Security — minimum attack surface

• Rivets out of reach — no fastener accessible or drillable from outside the module
• Tight door tolerances — every door closes to a gap too small to admit a pry tool or blade
• Anti-pry geometry — door and frame edges shaped to deny leverage

Fabrication & assembly

• Chemically bonded and riveted — structural adhesive plus rivets, not reliance on welding
• Cost efficient to fabricate — standard stock and processes, no exotic tooling
• Kit-plane assembly — pre-formed, pre-drilled, self-jigging parts a competent shop can put together predictably and a builder can service later

Locking & access control

• Electronic locks — Southco R4-EM (R4-EM-9P15-150) rotary electronic latches
• NFC access — a custom PCB / MCU drives the latches, actuated by NFC (tap to unlock)

Changelog