Building Truck Rack - TDR Roundtable

Building Truck Rack

04-23-2009, 12:36 AM

#1 (permalink)

EKlem

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Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: Hanover, NH Posts: 449

Building Truck Rack

I was wondering whether any of you have any experience with building a rack for your truck. The purpose of the rack is going to be to haul both sea kayaks and whitewater kayaks. The truck has a cap on it(it has been structurally compromised due to the weight on it which is the reason that I am building a rack) and the cap will stay on full time.

My real question here is what size and thickness of tubing to use? The rack is going to follow the general design of ladder racks made for going outside the cap although with a few key differences to accommodate a lot of kayaks. I have drawn up a design in Solidworks (a 3D CAD program) and used FEA to examine the strength. Given a load of 500lbs and a 4g bump, the rack has a safety factor of 5 which seems like plenty to me since a 4g bump is pretty darn severe. The tubing that I have designed it with is 2"X2" 14 gauge square tube. I want to go with square since it will be a lot easier to do all of the weld joints with since I can cut all of the angles on an italian band saw. In the experience of anyone who has built something like this, is this tubing heavy enough?

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