How to Secure Stroller in Bed

I tinkered on this a little today after work. I cut a 6" section of rubber garden hose and a slightly shorter piece of 1/2" dowel rod. I drilled a hole through the dowel rod just large enough to push a length of paracord through. I used a hole punch to pop a hole in the side of the garden hose. I strung the paracord through the garden hose hole and the dowel rod and pushed the dowel into the garden hose. I bought a Cord-Lock from Farm and Fleet on my way home from work.


I slipped the paracord through the cord-lock and then knotted the ends of the paracord so the cord-lock can't come off. This is what it looks like:


To use, just drop the end through the thing you want secured:


Loop the hose through the paracord:


Drop the garden hose section into the tailgate gap and slide the cord-lock up the paracord until the garden hose section is just about an inch or two under the bed.


When you shut the tailgate, that gap will significantly shrink and the section of hose will be trapped, tying your stroller (or in my case creeper) back against the tailgate.

I also made a different style using 1" webbing:


This version is similar except the 1" webbing just wraps around the dowel that's inside of the hose. It took a little longer to cut the 1" slit in the garden hose, but I didn't have to thread paracord in and out of holes. Right now the dowel is fairly loose inside the hose and could fall out. While at Farm and Fleet, I bought that 1" webbing buckle which might make this design pretty slick, too. Just slip the buckle around the stroller axle and click it to itself and then pull the webbing through the buckle until it positions the hose section in the right spot. If it works well, then maybe squirt some RTV into the ends of the hose to secure the dowel inside.

Nervey said:

Your Cord Lock version is almost the perfect multi-use case. I think that's a great solution.

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No need for a special fastener. Just use a figure-8 knot. Also known as a stopper knot. Easy to tie and untie.


The dowel-hose combo might be more resistant to sliding under lateral load, but I would not trust either method for that use case.

I made a 2nd paracord one, but instead of using a wooden dowel rod, I used a section of 1/2" copper pipe, which fits snug inside the garden hose. Unfortunately, 1/2" steel conduit is just a little too big to fit in my rubber garden hose. I drilled a hole in the pipe and used a hole punch to pop a hole in the hose.


I pushed the pipe into the garden hose so that the hole in the pipe lined up with the hole in the hose, then pushed the paracord in through the aligned holes and fished it out of one end of the pipe. I slipped the cord through a small flat washer and knotted the cord.


I then pulled the cord back through the assembly, pulling the washer and knot into the pipe.


This works great for securing a milk crate:


I used it twice just yesterday... Once to hold a cooler and again to hold a kid's bicycle against the tail gate. I actually have a cargo spreader bar, but this is so much easier because you don't have to climb into the bed to set it up and it's small and stows anywhere when you're not using it.

OneFish said:

I may need to add some of the bed rails you showed for tie-downs. What a great excuse to add rails.

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In case you didn't see it, here's a little more information on the parts I used for the L-Track:

What I didn't mention in that post is that I had to "turn down" the 10mm countersink to fit in between the L-Track flanges. I just chucked it up in my drill and held it against my belt sander until it measured slightly less than the gap in the L-Track. Then I also did the same to the heads of the stainless 6mm flat-head screws. That counter-sink was junk anyway. It worked fine on the aluminum but none of the ones in the set are very sharp. So grinding it down to use for this one project didn't bother me at all!


The 3 on the left are slightly turned down to fit in the countersunk hole compared to the original one on the right:


If you don't want to mess with any of the flat-head countersunk screw shenanigans, you could also just buy socket-head or button-head hardware instead of the flat-head hardware. You'd be giving up exactly 3 tie-down locations in the L-Track per side, but that doesn't seem like a huge deal-breaker to me. I think the L-Track has 1" tie-down spacing, so each side has 45 tie-down spots (each piece is 46" long, but they cut halfway through a tie-down spot on each end). So if you used protruding hardware, you'd "only" have 42 tie-down locations per side.

I actually ran into a situation the other day where I wanted to use the Tailgate Tether (Tailgate Tie-down?) and it was too short to reach the lower mower handle cross-bar! So tonight I cannibalized the one I made with the wooden dowel and upgraded it to the copper pipe design with a longer paracord. I also found some two-hole cord locks, which work great!





I was afraid that this long one would turn into a tangled mess. But I found that if you wrap it around itself and slip the end around the hose and snug up the cord-lock, it holds itself together nicely.


By-the-way, for all the ones I made, I used 5/32" 550 paracord:


Ok, I think I'm done with this now. I have a short one and a long one. It's just been fun to tinker on a simple crafty project.