DISCLAIMER:This is not a how-to article, it's a general info article
so you can laugh at my limited skills. Building your own kayak rack
can be extremely dangerous and as an added negative, if you don't do
it right the rack can break and your kayak can end up hitting the
freeway and damaging other vehicles or worse yet, other drivers! If
you try to build your own rack and something happens you do so at
your own risk! Pretty much if you try to replicate someone's designs
and it falls apart, that's Gods will I guess!
Some general info:
The kayak racks I was looking at were running about $400 and I
thought that was insane considering they are only pieces of
metal. This rack probably ran about 60$ in parts, without stainless
hardware. Before you begin, first you have to find someone that welds
or owns a muffler shop or a metal shop. Baby sit his kids, buy him
beer or whatever it takes, because you are going to require his
skills. Remember this is your new best friend! Do him a favor and
then casually tell him you are planning to build a rack. When he
tries to run away tackle him and remind him you are best friends and
plus you did that favor for him a while back!
Materials:
FOR THE STANDARD RACK
(8) 4" steel plates
(4) large 1.25" or larger tubular steel, get the stiff stuff, not
that thin walled stuff
(8) 5/16" bolts and nuts, lockwashers and washers
Primer and Paint
Pasti dip to coat the bottom of the rack so it doesn't scratch up
the roof
(2) foam floats from walmart
velcro or some type of ties to hold the foam down
EXTENDED TWO KAYAK RACK
If you want to make the extensions you will also need:
(4) 5/16" bolts and nuts, lockwashers and washers
(2) long pieces of 1.25" or larger tubular steel (I made mine 80"
each)
The first thing I did was measure the dimensions of my kayak.
The beam width of the Malibu extreme measured about 32" wide.
Then I measured the shell, my camper shell measures 67" long by 43"
wide.
I wanted the rack to be at least 5" high to clear the bow of the
kayak when I strap it upside down, thus I came up with these plans:
Spend as much time working on the plans as possible, hours even.
Then when you are all done throw them in the trash! One thing I
quickly learned about the kayak rack is that you have to pretty much
build it piece by piece and you can't really count on your diagram
because of angles and weird stuff like that. However I guess the
diagram gives you a little bit to work with. I ended up making it
with square tubing because my dad was the welder and he said the flat
surface gives you more area to bind with than tubular steel which
made sense to me.
The first thing we did was cut the 4" plates, 4 of them are for
the top support and the other 4 serve as gigantic washers to keep my
kayak from pulling the rack out of the fiberglass shell. We
predrilled all of the holes in the plates to match up the top and
bottom, I also labeled each plate so I knew if it was the front/back
or top/bottom etc. Here is a close up of the base washer plate that
goes under the camper shell.
Note there are two holes only, I could have done 4
but my dad said two would be plenty to hold it down. I painted these
white to match the undercoating of the fiberglass camper shell
This is one of the top base plates, already welded to
the frame. I bent the plates by hand using an anvil and a hammer to
fit the contour of the camper shell.
One of the hardest things to do is to try to bend the pipe to fit
the top of your camper shell, we had to take into consideration h
eight and angle. My dad is the greatest, he heated up the bar and
bent it by hand. If your NEW BEST FRIEND has a mandrel or something
to bend your pipe you will be in great luck! Otherwise you can also
cut the pipe and weld it to make the bends.
The next step after bending the pipe and fitting it to the roof of
the shell is to weld the plates to the pipe. Remember which plates
are the front/back etc or else you will be s.o.l and will have to
make new base plates for the underside to match up the holes. This
took us the longest because we put the plates on the roof and then
taped them down. Then we put the frame on the plates and had to
angle grind it little by little until it sat right. Damn that took a
long ass time!
Once we had the base plates welded on we spaced out
the rack to the edge of the camper shell and welded on the kayak
crossbars. If you look really close you will see 5/16" holes that I
drilled on each end, this is because I didn't want to have long bars
on my truck knocking people upside their heads. Insead we built 80"
extensions that I can bolt thru the holes directly on top of the
normal bars for useage when I'm hauling two kayaks! I don't have a
pix of the extensions but it fits perfectly on top of the kayak
crossbars.
Drilling the holes in the top of the kayak bars was also hard
because I had already welded the crossbars to the frame. Remember
what I said about plans, well when we welded the crossbars the heat
had bent the metal a bit so it didn't sit perfectly flat. So when I
drilled I couldn't use my press and had to hand drill the holes at a
slight angle.
The finished rack. It would've been better to have it
powder coated but that would have added cost so I used primer and
cheap spray paint, flat black. It will scratch and flake later but I
can always repaint it. The last step was trying to figure out a way
to keep the base from scratching up my roof. I decided to try to use
plastidip, I got it at home depot. It's a liquid dip that puts a
thin rubber coating on tools and stuff, I'll have to see how it holds
up in the long run.
My poor damaged truck roof! Putting that rack on and
off and welding the steel plates to the frame made all those tiny
scratches. We welded the plates on top of the truck to make sure we
got the angle right, we also tried to keep the sparks from damaging
the roof but some still got on there and burned the paint! These are
two of the holes we drilled thru the roof to attach the rack.
I used all stainless bolts and stuff to keep the rust
down, I also used wingnuts so I can quickly remove the rack if I
needed to, this is a pix of the bottom of the plates that secure the
rack to the camper shell.
To make sure the camper shell is securely bolted to
the truck frame I made big plates to serve as washers to hold the
fiberglass down. See that tiny washer? That's all that was holding
down the shell before, kinda scary! The new plates keep the camper
shell tight and with all the precautions on the roof attachment the
rack is rock solid, knock on wood!
That's my completed truck rack! It carries my
extreme perfectly and if I need to carry another kayak I just have to
remove the foam and then bolt on the extended bars to the existing
bars. I also plan on using tiedowns in the front and the rear
because I read a scary ass story about a kayak coming lose online,
better safe than sorry!
Part II
The Hully Roller
Now that I have the rack for my truck I was trying to figure out a
way to get that kayak up on the roof a little easier. Keep in mind
the extreme weighs 65 plus pounds and when you are dealing with a
long object it tends to be hard to carry and I kayak by myself most
of the time and I didn't want the thing falling on cars or breaking
my back. So I sat down and sketched out an idea for a hully roller.
Materials:
(2) sticks 3/4" pipe
(1) stick 1.25" pipe
(4) 3/4" elbows
(4) 3/4" T joints
(2) 1.25" coupling
(2) foam floats from walmart
First I built the base that lays along the window of my truck. I
took an elbow and connected a 3/4" pvc pipe to it and did the same on
the other side. Once this was done I put a T joint on one end and
had to figure out what angle I wanted it to lay in. Basically I
wanted the hully roller to be at an angle that wasn't too high but
high enough so I could roll the yak onto the kayak rack bars. Once
the angle was complete I glued the base and the T joint together.
Now came the hard part, I also had to figure out a way to keep the
thing from lifting when the kayak sat on the roller part. I figured
out that if I made two bars in an "L" shape I could lay this on the
top of my camper shell and under the kayak bars. This would keep the
pvc base from lifting up when I loaded the kayak onto it. I
connected the second set of T joints to the first T joints and glued
them but did not add the cross bar yet.
Basically the roller part is made up of 1.25" pvc that uses the
3/4" stuff as an axle, its the blue thing in the middle of the
picture below. I used two 1.25" couplings and placed them 3" apart
to form a type of groove that the kayak would sit into. I also
figured I'd have to put some sort of covering on it so the kayak
wouldn't get scratched when I rolled it up. I ended up using 1.5"
blue flat pool tubing, this was a mistake that I'll have to correct
later because the kayak is cutting thru the tubing. It was also a
bitch to slip that stuff over the pvc, I had to use rubbing alcohol
to lube it and pull hard, it took about fifteen minutes damn it!
I cut the 1.25" pvc to fit over the elbows of the 3/4" pipe and
elbows. Remember under that 1.25" is a rod of 3/4" that serves as a
axle of the hully roller. Look at the above picture closely, it's
actually upside down. The two blue foam pieces on the bottom of the
picture sit on top of my camper shell. The two other blue foam
pieces on the top of the picture rest on the window of my shell. And
the blue thing in the middle is the groove where the 1.25" couplings
are spaced out, next to that is the 1.25" pipe. Together these pieces
form the hully roller. Ignore that elbow on the top of the pix, that
was cuz originally the design was going to be different and once
again I modified it all!
I made sure that I glued all the pvc together at the joints and it
was finished! It works great I can load up my kayak without having
to worry about it falling off and hitting the cars next to me.
The finished product!
Notes on the hully roller:
I made my hully roller out of 3/4" pvc but 1" would be better
because it would be stronger. The only problem is that the foam
wouldn't fit over the pvc. Plus I had a lot of 3/4" stuff left over
from my other projects.
The foam keeps the pvc from hitting my roof and my window.
This set of pvc cant be broken down because I didn't want it to
twist under the weight of the kayak, however it is easily removed
from the camper shell, basically you just lift it off!
Try it out! If it works well send me one million dollars or
buy me a diet pepsi with lemon the next time I fish with you! If you
don't like it too bad, I didn't beg you to make the thing you dummy.
DISCLAIMER:This is not a how-to article, it's a general info article
so you can laugh at my limited skills. Building your own kayak rack
can be extremely dangerous and as an added negative, if you don't do
it right the rack can break and your kayak can end up hitting the
freeway and damaging other vehicles or worse yet, other drivers! If
you try to build your own rack and something happens you do so at
your own risk! Pretty much if you try to replicate someone's designs
and it falls apart, that's Gods will I guess!
Some general info: 
