Boy, time sure flies when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Harvey, Dina, Patti and I went to the movies last Sunday to see the last Harry Potter movie. It was excellent!
Well, here it is Saturday again. I have been working on the kayak rack on the jeep. I had to redesign the whole thing. As it turned out, the square pegs in the square sockets worked ok until I welded the cross pieces on. Everything had to be aligned just perfectly for it to work. The tolerances were just too close and things just jammed up when I tried to install or remove the rack.
I finally settled on using a 3/8 bolt on the end of the uprights. The bolt fits through a hole in a piece of angle iron and then is tightened down with a nut.
The angle iron is welded to the bracket in place of the square socket.
Once I got that fixed and installed the front and rear racks, I realized that I would have to tie the front and rear together to stiffen up the whole thing. I still wanted to keep the ability of one person to be able install and remove the rack so I welded a plate to both ends of two pieces of 3/4” square tubing and bolted that to the side of the front and rear racks.
The plate acts like a gusset and stiffened things up but is still removable. Only time will tell how well it will hold up.
Now I have to take the whole thing apart and weld up all the places where I just tacked it together. Then I have to clean the metal and paint it. After that I will glue some padding on the crossbars to protect the kayaks. Then its just a matter of throwing the boats on, tying them down and heading for the river.
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