Lately we’ve been on the road for a few weeks , and we had a lot things in our pick up truck . Most stuff I have are things in cardboard boxes, luggage bags, shoe boxes, small chairs, hiking equipment , bikes , some toys without boxes , in a word, it’s a mess. I tried to load them up in an ordered fashion but it was proved that my effort was futile. When the trunk is full I just stared at the mess I created, said to myself, I just did that? OK, I actually did that. Then it occurred to me that I couldn’t get on my way like this, What would happen to me if I did drive like this? either the stockpile fell apart on the road, may or may not hit someone else or cause accidents, or before anything could happen I would be stopped by a police officer and get ticketed. Either way I would screw up, that wasn’t something I wanted, I believe no one would want that.
Let’s see what I could do now, I either could repack everything and tie them down or just hold the whole mess together with something, in a word, I need something to tie my stuff down in the trunk, and this “something” can’t be too big or too expensive. Do I need heavy duty tie downs such as ten thousand pounds ratchet straps or grade 70 tie down chains? Definitely no. All I need is something can hold a few hundred pounds and can cover the trunk, not some serious application at all. I see people use cargo bars to organize their trunk but that’s not what I wanted, all I want is to secure the load already in my trunk. Usually I would drive to local store to find what I wanted but this time I decided to go online.
At first I was totally lost because there so many tie downs, but when I narrow down my search to pick up truck I was able to find something useful, at first I found some 1” ratchet straps, camouflage ones, I liked these straps but they are too much in strength for me, even they were not too expensive, cam buckle tie downs were not better in this sense, all I could see was something too much in strength, too little in real world use,what a piece of 1” ratchet strap could do with the huge pile such as the stuff on my truck? To be clear, these one inch straps are not good for huge pile of small stuff. Then I ran into this gem: cargo net for pick ups, the size is 48”x60” which is ideal for my truck, To use cargo nets is pretty simple, just cover the pile with cargo net, hook the hooks on the cargo net on the truck, that’s it. With cargo nets come bungee cord, the bungee cords are just perfect for tying down cargo net, in fact the cargo net is made of interconnected bungee cords! In a nutshell, the small cargo nets and bungee cords are light duty tie downs made just for the purpose of holding together and tying down small but irregular loads such as the pickup truck mess in my case. There are a lot interesting use for these cords and nets, the only limit is your imagination.
