My Big (Roof) Rack

Ok, first off an apology as I haven't blogged for 2 and a half months, and to be honest, it's because I haven't really touched the camper for a while, because, whilst the Splitty is now in the garage, that garage is both freezing and too small to do any exterior work on. What I did do though, just before I took it off the road for the winter, is use it to move a sofa bed from my parents house to my house. This necessitated the use of my roof rack...

When I used to be into hot hatches and I had all my little stripped out Nova's, the last thing on my mind would ever have been to buy a roof rack. In my mind they looked really uncool, it was something old people had on their car and I certainly didn't want one on mine. Oh how things change...

Skip forward a few more years and I've now got the campervan, and having taken the trip to Cornwall I'd realised that I didn't have nearly enough storage space, especially after I'd gone out and bought a surf board. With a trip to Croyde planned in a month, and now two surf boards to get down there, the hunt was on.

When I started, I really wanted a period/period style 3 bow rack. These seemed to vary in price, but Just Kampers had a nice one at £150 which I was very tempted by. I kept putting it off and off until whilst I kept an eye out on ebay and various forums for a cheaper/period one. I was becoming extremely bored and frustrated with this, and considered giving up, when fortunately, my patience paid off and one came up on ebay.

With a winning bid of £81 I secured the roof rack. Now to be fair, this rack did not fulfill any of my criteria as far as I could see, it wasn't three bow, it wasn't period or period style, but it was 8ft long, which was far bigger than any of the other's I'd been looking at, and I was sure I had a bargain.

So the next weekend 4 of us set up to collect it from Hertfordshire from a very nice guy called Matt. He had an OG 11 window, with a very nice interior! He told me that the rack had come with his Splitty when shipped it over from the US, but was now surplus to requirements.

By the looks of it the rack is made of aluminium and is extremely light (I can pick it up by myself and get it on top of the bus), it's a little disfigured and bent but still looks nice.

Anyhow, we bolted it on, surprisingly quickly with just eight Allen key bolts, using some windscreen wiper rubber under the fixings to prevent the paint from getting damaged.

The full length

The full width

So move on a couple of weeks and it's now time for Croyde and the roof racks first usage. Having bought and borrowed a load of bungee cables, I also purchased a couple of tie down straps for the surf boards. This is when things started to get a bit weird. I really enjoyed strapping all the items to the roof rack, it seemed to give me a tremendous sense of manliness. A sort of "look at me, and what I have safely attached to my roof rack, yes, I can tie things down well, Grrr!!!"

I also got some strange pleasure from exactly what I could strap to it, none more so than the attachment of the BBQ we were taking, for some reason I really liked the thought of people seeing the BBQ up there when they (inevitably) overtook the van on the road!

The confused pleasure didn't end there, when we got to Croyde I got yet more excited about having to climb up onto the rack itself, and untie things! Apparently when Matt owned the rack, two of his friends slept on it, just with plywood on top! One day, one day...

The Rack's first journey

Since then the rack has only really been used twice more, once when Vanessa and I went surfing in Wittering and then finally a few weeks ago with the sofa bed. However I have to say that getting what must have been about 70kg sofa bed onto, and off of a roof rack that's six foot off the ground is no easy task! Back pain anybody???

Thinking forward to this summer, I'm already wondering what other marvelous things I can strap onto it during trips away...



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