Home Grown Solutions

[sean112280]

Nice panel you made!

[cico7]

Good post Caleb!

[IamJEEP]

Nice panel you made!

Good post Caleb!

Thanks guys!

[IamJEEP]

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[IamJEEP]

Sal, post your new roof rails.

[Sal-XK]

I will havent been on a computer for a few days but I'll get to it.

[Sal-XK]

I decided to go with 7/8 shallow unistrut its the stuff you hang pipes from buildings and is pretty strong. It comes with all sorts of stuff to mount in the channel so the mounting possibilities are endless.

Unistrut


Cut and painted to length then mounted up.


Close up to roof line





And of course the fishing rod holders had to go back on


This mod dropped the top of my basket about 2" maybe a little more. The best thing is you can run wires down the channel and mount stuff to it with off the shelf hardware. I also think unistrut might make a pretty good light bar as well. The total for this mod wan $18.

[pjmjr508]

Great work sir

[Matt]

Hey Sal, whats the distance from the bottom of the unistrut to the top of the roof rack rails? I think im going to mill some aluminum spacers for an increased footprint/support. It'll also look cleaner.

I think 1.5" thickness (for height) should be enough based on your pictures. I'd mill out a slot on the top that would "capture" the cross rails, (probably my Thule load bars, but will definitely give the uni-strut stuff a good look!).

A 2" wide x 1.5" thick x 12" long piece of 6061 aluminum is $30 and that's enough to make 6 2" mounts. (Hell a 3 ft section is under $80... so if this works out I may want to get that in case someone else wants some machined). FYI its part number 8975K311

[Matt]

Here's a quick 2 minute sketch I made of what im envisioning for the mounts. After i drew the side view I decided to make it isometric to help give it some perspective... so it looks kind of funny because the bolt and stuff is strictly 2D.

When i get some good measurements I'll probably make a quick 3D model and tweak the design a few times. I'm thinking of a way to make it lockable (other than blasting a hole through the bolt and putting on a small lock).




Edit: was just looking at my sketch and trying to think of what i'd do with that lower clamping plate. Since the underside of the crossrails aren't level either, we'd end up with that uneven plate (as drawn). I don't want to machine it out of aluminum because then it'd be too thin of a lip in tensile/shear for my liking... so I need to take some measurements to see how much of an actual difference there is, basically what angle are we dealing with. If the angle isn't too drastic, im hoping 1/4" or even 3/8" steel plate will work (like if there's 1/8" difference in height) so that the bolt is perpendicular with both upper and lower surfaces.

Started a design thread for the mounts HERE