How to Secure a Milwaukee PACKOUT Stack in Your Truck Cab

Why the bed is the wrong place for daily boxes

There is a difference between where tools live and where tools ride.

The bed is fine for lumber, for the generator, for the box you open twice a month. It is a poor home for the boxes you open eleven times a day, and there are four reasons that come up over and over.

Weather. PACKOUT boxes are water resistant, not sealed. They handle rain landing on them. They are less happy sitting in standing water in a bed corner, and nobody has ever been glad they left a box out through a Texas summer or an Idaho January.

Dust. Anyone who has driven a gravel road with an open bed knows the fine grey film that ends up on everything. It gets into latches. It gets into the tools.

Theft. A locked cab is a locked cab. An open bed is a display case, and PACKOUT is a recognizable, resellable system. That is not a knock on the boxes. It is a consequence of them being good.

Access. This is the one nobody lists and everybody feels, and it is not about distance. Both the bed and the cab are the same walk from wherever you are standing. The difference is what happens when you get there.

On a modern half-ton the bed floor sits somewhere around 34 inches off the ground and the side rails add another 20 or so on top of that. So the top edge of the bed is roughly chest height, and the box you want is on the far side of it, usually pushed forward against the bulkhead where it will not slide. Getting to it means dropping the tailgate and climbing up, or leaning across a rail that is taller than your reach is long.

The cab is a door handle and a hinge. Box at seated height, arm's length, both feet on the ground. Multiply that difference by the twenty times a day you go looking for something and it stops being a small thing.

So the boxes come inside. And then the second problem starts, because a back seat is not a shelf. It is a contoured cushion with a slope built into it, designed so a human body settles back into it. That same slope means anything rigid sitting on it wants to travel forward, and the soft foam means it does so without much warning.

You brake at a light. The stack shifts. You brake hard on the highway once and the top box is in the footwell with the latch popped and half the sockets loose.

Four things people try, and how each one fails

Nearly everyone works through some version of this list before landing on a platform. It is worth going through them honestly, because two of them almost work.

1. Stacked loose on the seat

Free, takes no time, and lasts until the first hard stop. The slope of the cushion does the work. Even latched together, a stack sitting on foam will walk forward over a day of driving and end up wedged against the front seat backs.

2. Strapped to the headrest posts

Better, and a lot of people run this for years. The problem is the geometry: the strap pulls back and up, the stack wants to go forward and down, and the seat cushion compresses under load so the strap goes slack after twenty minutes. You retighten it at every stop, or you stop noticing that it is loose.

3. On the floor behind the seats

Stable, genuinely. Also the least accessible spot in the vehicle, it puts the boxes where feet and dogs and passengers go, and on most crew cabs you can fit exactly one box before you have blocked the rear seats entirely.

4. Bed drawer or slide-out system

These are good products and they solve a different problem well. Two things push people back to the cab: they are heavy, which we will get to in a second, and they still leave the tools outside in the weather and behind a tailgate.

They went through several options over time. A slide canopy with drawers that slid out, but it was too heavy. Pickup Pack domes, but they were too cumbersome. Then their fleet guy started looking for backseat options. Utility co-op running a fleet of half-ton pickups

That sequence is worth sitting with, because it is not a story about a product being bad. It is a story about a half-ton truck having a finite budget, and that budget being spent before the work starts.

The payload problem nobody brings up

Every pound of storage system is a pound you cannot carry.

Payload is the number on the sticker inside your driver's door jamb, and on most half-ton pickups it lands somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand pounds depending on cab, bed, drivetrain, and options. That number is not just cargo. It includes you, your passengers, and everything bolted to the truck after it left the factory.

Bed drawer systems and slide-out canopies are steel or heavy composite, and they commonly weigh somewhere between one hundred and four hundred pounds empty depending on size and build. On a truck with fifteen hundred pounds to work with, a three-hundred-pound system is a fifth of your capacity gone before a single tool goes in it.

For a crew hauling wire, spools, ladders, fittings and materials, that trade is real money. It is the difference between one trip and two.

A back seat platform sits at the other end of that spectrum. It uses vertical space in a part of the cab that was already carrying nothing but air, it weighs a small fraction of a drawer system, and it does not touch the bed at all. The bed stays free for the things that belong in a bed.

What your stack actually weighs

Here is the thing that catches people out. An empty PACKOUT organizer feels like nothing. Four, five, six pounds. You can carry three of them at once with one hand.

Fill that same organizer with sockets, driver bits, nut drivers and a set of wrenches and you are somewhere around twenty-five pounds. Load a large tool box with a drill, an impact, two batteries and a charger and you are past forty. Loaded PACKOUT boxes routinely weigh three to five times their empty weight, and almost everybody estimates from the empty number because that is the one they have picked up recently.

So before you trust any platform with any stack, do the arithmetic. Pick your platform first, because capacity is per shelf.

PACKOUT Stack Weight Calculator

75 lb per shelf

Which KARGA are you working with?

Each shelf carries 75 lb. On a double, that capacity is per level and does not transfer between them.

Single Level

75 lb

One shelf. Open space underneath for taller gear.

Double Level

150 lb total

Two shelves at 75 lb each. Capacity does not transfer between levels.

← Change platform

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What is in your stack?

Typical loaded weights. Tap each box you intend to carry in the cab.

Rolling Tool Box ~30 lb Large Tool Box ~42 lb Tool Box ~30 lb Compact Tool Box ~20 lb Deep Organizer ~25 lb Compact Organizer ~16 lb Crate ~22 lb Tote ~12 lb

0 lb

Nothing selected

Weights shown are typical loaded figures for planning. Your boxes will differ. Put the actual stack on a scale before you commit to it.

Clear selection Find Your Fit

If the number comes back higher than you expected, that is the calculator doing its job. The fix is usually not a bigger platform. It is deciding which two boxes actually need to be within arm's reach and letting the rest ride in the bed.

What fits on a back seat platform

The limiting factor is rarely footprint. A full-size back seat is wide enough for most of what you would want up there. The two constraints that actually bite are the 75 lb per-shelf rating and the vertical clearance above the shelf.

The general rule: two boxes tall is the ceiling on a shelf, and the heavy one goes on the bottom. Three-high works beautifully in a shop and poorly in a moving vehicle, because the higher the center of gravity, the more a corner wants to tip it.

How to strap it so it stays put

The goal is one object, not several.

A stack of unlatched boxes under braking is three separate objects with three separate ideas about where to go. A latched stack is a single mass, and a single mass is something a strap can actually control.

1. Heaviest on the bottom. Not negotiable. This is the whole ballgame for stability.
2. Engage the side latches. Every one of them, both sides. This is the step people skip and it is the step that matters most.
3. Strap over the top, anchored both sides. A strap that only catches one side becomes a hinge, and the stack pivots around it.
4. Cinch until it stops rocking. Push the stack hard, forward and sideways, with the flat of your hand. Movement now means movement at sixty.
5. Add a second strap if the stack is tall, running the other direction. Two straps at ninety degrees will hold almost anything you can lift.

Flat webbing straps with a cam buckle work better here than ratchet straps. A ratchet gives you more force than a plastic tool box wants, and it is easy to crush a latch or bow a lid without noticing. You are not securing a load to a flatbed. You are keeping a stack from shifting inside a cab.

Common questions