Built a bed rack for my father's Tacoma

[dtc81]

My father recently bought a 2009 Tacoma TRD Sport, which is his daily driver. He does a lot of camping and backpacking, and is a woodworker by trade. He had dreamed up this idea of a roof rack that would allow him to carry long lengths of material, be able to keep his Truxedo tonneau cover, AND make a canopy so he could have "dry" shelter if he wanted to sleep in the bed of the truck. Well there we couldn't find a rack system that allowed all of those options for a reasonable price, so we decided to build our own.

I do a bunch of hobbyist metal fabrication (built all the bumpers/racks on my 4Runner) and have been looking for an excuse to buy a tube bender, and this was the perfect project for it. My father's friend is going to sew a waterproof canopy that will slip over the rack system, and provide a reasonably dry shelter. I'll be sure to add those pictures when he gets the canopy finished!

Fitting tubes (made a jig for the drill press to bore tubes consistently)


Tacked together


Finished (Besides paint and final mounting)

 

[borison]

Looks great, really like it.

 

[bknudtsen]

Nice. How does it attach to the bed sides?

 

[dtc81]

I'm going to drill through the plastic and install rivnuts in the bedsides. Probably 3per side. I use them at work, and figured they would work well for this application.

 

[team-oomizumi]

Looks awesome! Nice job.

Interested in some of the particulars:
What tube bender did you use?
Size(s) and thickness of the tubes?

 

[johnboytrd]

Nicely done!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[dtc81]

@team-oomizumi I bought a JD squared model 32 bender, and pulled 1.75" .120 wall HREW tube through it. It's an awesome machine. I built a stand out of some material I had laying around, then bolted it into my garage floor. I'm very impressed with the bender.

 

[dtc81]

Nicely done!

Thanks!

 

[BrianTN]

Looks great. I built something similar with a canvas top and brackets to add a roof rack on top if needed. More pics are in my build thread.

 

[jeverich]

Looks great!

I've built a few that parallel a design very similar - however, I use the bed bolts as an attachment point since I use mine to hold a roof top tent.

I'm sure you've already got it fastened securely to the bedsides without any issue - but just in case you haven't I'll throw in my .02.

I'd try and use the bed rail system as an anchor point for the rack. I know it may be a pain the butt with the tonneau cover on there, but I'd be weary of using riv-nuts in that application. Don't think there's an awful lot of meat to the sub frame underneath the bed sides on the 05+ Tacomas.

Grizzly's G9513 "T-Nut" is a pretty good solution to fasten to the bed rail track.

Just fabricated this due to being tired of having 20' sticks of tubing jerry-rigged in the bed..