Undercover's Swing Cases are a pretty new thing to us here at Stage 3. None of us have personally had them on a truck, and we were pretty fascinated by them when we first heard about them. Long story short, we got a pair of the in and went off to install the passenger side Swing Case onto our 2007 F150 5.4L Project Truck. While at first glance the Swing Cases don't seem like a "must-have" upgrade, when we finally got a real look at them, we were much more impressed. The sing cases are surprisingly practical for day-to-day use and are incredibly easy to install and operate. Now, our install on our 2007 F150 was mildly complicated by our plastic Ford bedliner (more on that later), but it was all very straightforward, and we're more than happy with the result.
Since we needed to operate cameras and stand around and look pretty, we grabbed our swing case (along with some other stuff), our truck, and our gear and drove down to our good friends over at Extreme Performance out in Goodyear, Arizona, for a little help with the dirty work. Jay and Kris were waiting to help us out with getting our Swing Case bolted into our truck, so we rolled the truck into one of Extreme's garages and they got to work.
Step one was to remove the passenger side bed cleat from the truck. Jay was neck-deep in cutting our truck's grille for our SmittyBilt M1 grille install, so Kris walked over and unbolted it.
Because our F150 still has a plastic bed liner (namely the optional Ford OEM bed liner), we needed to cut it quite a bit in order to install the swing case. F150s with a bare bed or a spray-on liner can just bolt-on the Swing Case's bracket. Now, Undercover's instructions don't get too specific for where you need to cut given the variety of different plastic bed liners on the market, but you need enough clearance for the bracket (which installs about an inch from the bottom of the bed) and enough clearance to fully close the swing case. This could mean more or less cutting depending on your liner. In any case, Jay grabbed his sawzall and got to slicing and dicing, first he cut out an area for the Swing Case Bracket.
After he had cut a place for the bracket, Jay lined in up in position in order to figure out where he needed to cut the liner for the Swing Case's latch.
Once he had the latch positioning figured out, Jay cut a square hole in our bed liner.
With everything cut for the bracket and latch, Jay slid the latch underneath the liner to the hole he cut and then aligned the bracket before bolting it down with the included self-drilling screws.
Jay then test-fit the Swing Case's actual box, but found out that a few pieces of the bed liner did not allow it to fully lock into its latch. He grabbed his sawzall and started cutting some more out.
After his last round of cutting, Jay dropped the Swing Case's tool box onto the bracket's hinges, and our installation was complete.
