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Yep, the whole thing was mostly an experiment. It is made of laminated MDF, not an ideal all-weather solution. It has rained here for the past few days, and surprisingly I haven't noticed any water penetrating the wood. As for the clamps, I had plenty of scrap wood lying around and just used what I had available. I have some scrap 1/2" EMT in the shed - I think I'll try to flatten and weld some of that into a more durable clamp.
As for results, it's hard to determine any FE gains with all this rain. However, watching the rear-view mirror I can see the aero effect at certain speeds by how the rain blows. It appears that most of the air flow is coming over the side of the bed rather than straight back from the cab as I would have expected. Imagine a diagonal line from the forward corners of the tonneau, going diagonally toward the center of the tailgate.
One other little detail that I realized during construction was that the bed of the truck actually tapers rearward from the cab to tailgate about five inches. I had always assumed this was a perfectly square box. I guess GM did put a little effort into aero after all...
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