SEREvince
Adventurer
Necessity is the mother of invention. Couldn't find a bare bones rack, so I fabricated one. I used inner supports from ACE Engineering, crossbars are Yakima round bars, and the feet are CNC'd 6061 AL. I was at a lost for a material to use as a gasket between the hard top and the feet, and I had a spare inner tube for my bike sitting there, so...:bike_rider: Mounts will be coming back off for anodizing. Typical matte black hard ano. I'll pick up another set of bars so I can leave the tent mounted and swap bars when I don't need it. May also do some simple "covers" so I can pull the feet completely off. I also have covers for all of the counterbore holes. Not really needed as all the hardware is SS, but I figured it would look more polished.
So far I just have about 200 miles on them, all with the tent. No appreciable increase in wind noise, no obnoxious whistles or hums. I pushed it hard on the freeway, rallied some FS roads, and the worst test is the road to my house which is 1 mile of badly corrugated gravel! lol Haven't finished a full tank yet, but so far it doesn't seem too far off normal consumption. Pretty sure impact without the tent will be zero or at least not measurable.
Overall I'm very happy with the results. I have about $500 into them not counting design and machine time. I bought way more from ACE than I needed as I wasn't exactly sure on the final plan. I would make a few changes on rev 2, than would cut material cost and run time, but that's always the way it is in prototyping. For me it's the best and the worst part of designing something.
Ugh, sorry about the pic size!
Cheers
Vince
So far I just have about 200 miles on them, all with the tent. No appreciable increase in wind noise, no obnoxious whistles or hums. I pushed it hard on the freeway, rallied some FS roads, and the worst test is the road to my house which is 1 mile of badly corrugated gravel! lol Haven't finished a full tank yet, but so far it doesn't seem too far off normal consumption. Pretty sure impact without the tent will be zero or at least not measurable.
Overall I'm very happy with the results. I have about $500 into them not counting design and machine time. I bought way more from ACE than I needed as I wasn't exactly sure on the final plan. I would make a few changes on rev 2, than would cut material cost and run time, but that's always the way it is in prototyping. For me it's the best and the worst part of designing something.
Ugh, sorry about the pic size!
Cheers
Vince
