Roof Rack Completion
Over the Jeep's "development period," the contents of the roof rack has been sparse and varied. I just got it into final form, though, and am very pleased with the results.
One thing that had to happen first was to stop moving the spare tire back and forth. It started life held to the roof rack with the plenty-strong and kind-of-nifty Poison Spyder 3-way tire strap that's usually used to hold the spare on a rear stinger tire carrier.
Then Paul Jensen made a custom mount for the tire to place it forward of the roof rack
which had many merits, not the least of which was helping to hold up his surfboard.
But after a few camping trips it became clear to me that having the tire that far forward sometimes was making the struts struggle to lift the roof, so I moved the tire back onto the rack.
That didn't seem the perfect solution, though, as it struck me that the dedicated tire mount Paul made was too trick not to use.
Therefore, I risked diving into the "systems" compartment:
to visit the air system pressure regulator, and was delighted to find there was still more pressure to be had. Adding another ten pounds to the pressure in the struts made them work smoothly and reliably with the spare at the forward edge of the roof. So now I had the whole roof rack available.
The rack itself is a JASO unit from Australia I'd purchased for another truck from a fellow Portaler prior to owning the Jeep. It's a very nice unit, and particularly appreciated for its light weight and corrosion resistance. The truck's Bully shovel (passenger's side) and Fiskers ax (driver's side) are attached with Quick Fists. The poles for the Foxwing and Foxwing awning extension are Velcro cinch strapped to the rear edge,
and L-track pieces
have been attached to all four sides (which was a really good idea). As the picture shows, the rack is attached through the thick fiberglass cabin roof with twelve threaded isolation bushings; it's on there very securely.
I then attached two Rotopax universal mounting plates to the rails:
I already owned the Rotopax mounts and backing plates needed to mount them directly to the rack rails, but I figured with my luck that I'd have a void right where I needed to put a bolt, so I used the plates for an easier install. As each rack can hold two mounts, and each mount can hold hold two cans, I could theoretically carry eight two-gallon Rotopaxs. But for reasons soon to be revealed, I needed to mount the plates where the rightmost can on the front mount would foul the frontmost can on the passenger-side mount, so six is the actual maximum.
In practice, two is the most common load:
with the area across the front of the rack used to carry the MaxTraxs.
The routine setup is two gallons of gasoline for the generator and two gallons of water for emergency use. The water is a belt-and-suspenders thing as there's up to 27 gallons of fresh water in the cabin's tank. It would take a combination of pretty unforeseeable circumstances to make that water strictly necessary, but having a couple gallons in a can would save hassles were there a pump failure or catastrophic leak.
If I needed lots of gas, it's easy to screw on more mounts and put the Rotopaxs under the MaxTraxs. Most times, though, it'll be easier to use a Super Siphon to get petrol from the vehicle tank.
The sophistication of the whole enterprise was given a boost when Equipt was able to restock the big, low Alu-Box ABS74 I really wanted. This low-slung case's form factor (about 31 x 21 x 8) is not available in any of the other usual suspects (Pelican, Hardigg, Zarges, etc.) and having it available made all the difference to my plan.
I was able to install it semi-elegantly by epoxying isolation pads that matched the case's rounded corners in just the right spots on the rack:
These are enough to locate the case and limit x-y movement, and lets me get away with no more tying down than cinching down the two handles to prevent up-and-down movement.
All of this manipulation resulted in this
All in all, I'm very pleased with how it turned out.
It's worth noting that I've been at this long enough to know the woes that can befall someone putting too much weight on a vehicle's roof and I'm staying alert for problems. All told, though, we haven't yet broken a hundred pounds yet (let's hear it for aluminum) and the stuff that'll go in the box won't be that heavy. Additionally, though, we are helped by the heavy-duty suspension which is already dealing with keeping 7000 pounds of truck stable, and thus doesn't seem to be noticing another 100 pounds, even when carried up high. Anyway, this isn't one of these eight-Jerry-can loads people write about, and I've not noticed any issues to date.
