Background:
I got rear-ended on the interstate on the way to work one day… a pretty significant hit – actually made the bed strike the cab. It didn’t BEND the frame (between the axles), but it did to some damage to the bed, cab, and rear portion of the frame.
- Cab repair
- Bedside replacement / Bed repair
- Tailgate replacement
- Bumper replacement
- Last 12” of the drivers side frame repair
- Hitch receiver replacement
The body shop did a great job sourcing a multifunction tailgate (MFT) for my truck. We found a nice aftermarket bumper. For the frame and hitch receiver, they found a donor chassis – based on the hitch receiver having rear tow hoops, I believe it was a TRX.
We ran into a few minor issues… as the project progressed.
Wiring:
First, the tailgates (MFT vs. original gate – “OG”) have very different connector pinouts – same connector, but different wires populated. Initially, we were worried we needed to add wires to the harness or re-pin the connectors. The chassis harness formt he donor chassis mentioned above was very different from the new tailgate. After some inspection, we found that the 2020 Ram Rebel (my truck) has all 8 pins on the chassis harness tailgate socket fully populated. This was a huge relief.
The takeaway is that the TRX did NOT have the MFT as an option – and therefore the chassis harness did NOT have all 8 wires populated.
Structure
Here’s where it got a little sketchy. The hinge location is fine. The frame mounts fine, and the tailgate cables work. No issues.
The strikers, however, are the primary issue to resolve.
The MFT strikers are mounted ~1” farther forward on the bedside than the OG strikers. There might be a fraction of an inch vertical difference, based on making measurements.
The MFT strikers are ¼” – ½” longer, as in, they extend further away from the bedside. This isn’t a hard fix – they can be unscrewed, and the washer threaded down the shaft of the bolt.
(Images)
The body shop and I both came up with a simple adaptor, because there is sufficient play between the bed side and the tailgate frame:
This allows almost infinite adjustment of striker location (within a defined region), if we can secure the bracket from rotating unintentionally – but there will no longer be striker length adjustment, except maybe for a bracket and nut depth.
The other option was to just measure, measure, measure, and then move the striker hole in the bed..
Operation
Initially, they thought the new gate was totally non-functional. While the sheet metal was getting painted, they had the internal harness and controller pulled out and plugged in for a functional check. Nothing was working. When I went over to help with troubleshooting, my first step was to close the middle-gate latches. Once I did that, the OG latch positions (“drop gate”) began working. The middle-gate would not function, though. In doing a little tinkering, it turned out one of my latch mechanisms appeared to be faulty. They have a couple sense resistors and a motor driver in them to tell fi they’re open or not, so I suspect one of them has a bad sense position. The manual release latch was broken off, so it needed to be replaced anyway.