So, I bought a RTT from
Cascadia Vehicle Tents
Now, I need to build a way to mount it over the bed.
I found a few sources of inspiration :
This was nice, but quite heavy.
This one is quite nice, too
So, I called my dad, and was all like - hey! Do you still have the welder and a garage. And wanna feed me steak for a week while we build a rack ?
He was cool with it.
Short digression here - he and I talked a bit about what to build it out of. I suggested steel, but he raised the point that it was going to be heavy at the OD I was wanting, and my weight budget - about 900 lbs loaded - was a consideration.
He suggested we use EMT. He had used it for lots of projects - deer stands and ice shanties and such, so it seemed reasonable. It's a subject of some debate, so let me lay some points out :
Pros :
inexpensive
easy to get
easy to work with
it can be welded and ground, provided you take some precautions with ventilation
corrosion resistant
lightweight
Cons:
Not as strong as steel tube.
if it's galvanized, it can be a real pain to weld on
hard to bed without the right die
I ran some numbers on 1.25" EMT with a ME friend of mine. Given the load on it - ~125lbs of RTT, the design we laid out should hold up fine.
Now, we got a jack style tube bender to use, but the die we had didn't work, even though it was supposed to - it was just a little too narrow and would crease it. So we had to use the old fashioned method :
It worked well enough, but its hard to get consistent bends doing it by hand. We did OK, though. Lost a whole 10' section to practice, though.
So, after that, we set up a jig and cut and notched the crossmembers
I want to add some others, but I'm not sure yet where and how, so I'll do that in the future.
Now, to make the rails. I got a 20' 3 inch bar of 1/4" thick plate steel for 30 bucks from a scrap yard. The Tacoma bed rail has a taper to it, though, so I need to cut the bars to match.
The cut looks like ****, but thats why god invented grinders.
Now, to weld it. We had to travel to a Denny's house, because Denny just got a new heavy duty line feed arc welder and he wants to try it out. Also, Dad'd little linefeed just doesn't have the juice we need to get good penetration on the steel plate.
Now, I need to attach it to the bed rails. A couple washers cut down to fit and a bolt welded on
Now, to cut some brackets from some angle iron we had laying around
And weld them on