We’re big fans of Decked, the company which makes drawers you can install in the bed of your burly pickup truck. It’s clever, adding covered compartments in the truck bed, while still giving you a shallow bed on top, so you still have open storage options. The Decked Truck Toolbox is the outfit’s newest product, giving you a seemingly traditional storage chest, albeit with a clever twist inside.
Like other storage chest for trucks, it’s designed to go at the inner end of the truck bed, keeping the rest of the cargo area accessible from the tailgate. Unlike them, it comes with a built-in facility that makes it possible to easily access the contents of the toolbox from the side of the bed, making it especially useful when you’re carrying large items behind the chest, which will make it hard to get to the box from the tailgate.
The Decked Truck Toolbox is a tub-style toolbox that installs on the bed of standard pickups. Instead of sitting right on the floor of the bed, though, it hovers above it, with the sides of the box resting snugly on the rails of the truck bed instead. This design choice makes it so that the lid of the toolbox can be opened from the sides for easy access to the contents, regardless of how deep your actual truck bed is. This is important for those times you’ve got a lot of cargo stashed in the back, which would make it difficult to reach the chest from the tailgate without moving things around.
Not tall enough to actually access the contents of the toolbox from the sides? Well, the outfit offers an optional ladder that folds into the side of the chest’s compartment. Just lift up the lid, deploy the ladder down the side, and you’ve got yourself a way to easily access all your gear in the box. According to the outfit, the ladder takes up minimal space, so you still have the rest of the chest to store all your stuff.
The Decked Truck Toolbox measures 76 x 20.5 x 22 inches (width x height x depth), with the main compartment coming with 9.8 cubic feet of room (73 gallons), so you can stash a good amount of stuff inside. It’s made from injection-molded, high-density polymer that’s the same material they use in football helmets, so your gear is protected inside a very durable shell, with the lid getting additional steel reinforcements for even more durable performance. A gasket in the lid ensures water is unable to enter it at any point, so you gear stays dry, while a steel armored locking mechanism will keep it inaccessible the whole time it’s unattended.
To make opening the lid easy from the sides, it uses torsion springs for opening and closing, so as long as you unlock it, you should be able to raise the lid with a light push. Lastly, it gets a pair of tie-down loops at the base, so you can secure large equipment you’re transporting, such as bikes, motorcycles, or appliances.
The Decked Truck Toolbox is available now, priced starting at $700.