When I purchased my new (to me) truck last year, one of the things that my wife and I noticed right away was how much higher it sits than my old truck. My old truck was a GMC Sierra 1500 and it was much closer to the ground so running boards were not a necessity.
This new truck is a GMC Sierra 2500 and the need for running boards has become very apparent every ti me I have to haul myself up into the cab. On top of that our dog Jovi is 11 years old now and she can't always make those big leaps the way she used to. Luckily, I was able to do some side work lately and I came up with some spare change to buy some running boards.
From what I have seen online, cost to have them installed is anywhere from $100 to $200. I think a lot of it depends on if you have a diesel truck or a gas truck. Diesel trucks require some items to be removed on the undercarriage to attach the brackets.
I consider myself a pretty handy guy and I have a good number of tools at home, so I decided I would just purchase the running boards off of Amazon and install them myself. Luckily, my truck is a gas model, so didn't have to worry about all of the headaches a diesel truck has when installing the boards.
I found a set that my wife and I both liked and it also had really good reviews on Amazon. It was right around the $200 price so I pulled the trigger and had them delivered to the house.
As you can see, there isn't much to them when you open the box. Just the two running boards along the side and the mounting hardware sitting in the middle of the box.
The directions really weren't as straight forward as I had hoped, so I had to watch a couple YouTube videos just to get my bearings. I pulled all of the hardware out of the box and figured out what size wrenches I was going to need.
Assembling the brackets is probably the part of the job that took the longest. Mostly because the first time I used the wrong bolts and I had to tear them all apart and then put them back together. That is pretty common for me, so I wasn't too surprised. I just laughed at myself and then fixed it.
I was going to go to my friend Mike's house and use his lift to install these. Then I remembered how busy he is with his handyman business and as I mentioned before, the truck sits so high, it wasn't a big deal to crawl under.
This picture is taken of the underside of the truck. You can see that most trucks have the spots for the mounting bolts built right into them. There was no need to drill holes or anything.
I set to work and before long I had the three mounts installed on the driver side. I am not kidding when I say this literally took maybe ten to fifteen minutes. It was basically just tightening some bolts.
After that I just had to slide some bolts into the tracks on the underside of the running boards and then line them up with the brackets I had installed. I made sure everything was level and spaced correctly and then I crawled back under to tighten up those bolts.
The passenger side went much more quickly. As I said, the longest part was my mistake when putting the brackets together. With the brackets in place on the passenger side I just needed to install the last running board.
I am really happy with how these turned out and I never would have guessed the install would be so easy! If I had realized that, I would have purchased them months ago!
This is definitely an add-on that you shouldn't have any hesitation about installing yourself on your own truck. As long as you find a good quality product, the end result couldn't be any better!
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
You must own at least 200 CC to reward commenters on this post!
Please charge 200 CCs to reward your commenters.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit