Repurposed Grab Handles
On a recent trip down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Cambria, we put the Full Monty through its paces loaded with all our camping gear for a five-day ride down the coast for three people and a sixteen-foot ocean kayak.
KCCampMoty.jpg
An annoyance was packing and unpacking the RTT gear - sleeping bags and ThermoRests - to get to other heaver kit packed underneath. The routine developed to, upon arriving, open up the RTT, load it with this stuff, freeing access to the rest of the gear.
To address this (aside from building a sliding drawer system), I thought to repurpose the grab handle mounts in the third row seating area and turn them into racks to which bungee cords could be attached.
Stuffrackdetail.jpg
The racks are bars salvaged from a broken bag chair. I drilled holes in the bars through which they mounted to the factory attachments for the grab handles using longer hardware.
It's not pretty, but using a few or as many bungees as needed keeps the rack adjustable. I thought about stringing shock cord through drilled holes in the racks, but I like the flexibility of this set-up.
Stuffrackload.jpg
In the process of loading the rack I managed to dislocate my left elbow in a freak lateral move of packing in a sleeping bag. Other than that, it's faired an off-road test well, clutching its contents to the ceiling out of the way of packing in the rest of the gear.
Stuffrackest.jpg
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Originally Posted by southpier
