Brand new & building a ladder rack. Advice?

Here is a very simple rack that I made for a 2001 Tacoma and then changed the mounting a little so it will work with my 2008.

I use the rear d-ring bolts to secure the rear of the rack and turnbuckles on the front. Its very easy to remove and mount and it serves my purpose very well.

 

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Here’s a photo of the new bedrail mounted to the truck.

 

Tac , nice work my friend .

 

Thanks guys.

I think I’m going to start making the upper rack tomorrow. It will be very similar to my old design from the first post. It’s an over the cab rack with the ability to fully support 10’ long material. It will also have a middle horizontal bar just behind the cab to protect the roof and allow me to hold material 6’ or longer up top (like where a headache style bar goes).

For anyone thinking about building an over the cab ladder rack like this, there are two design considerations that really make the rack more user friendly. First, the back horizontal bar should be removable for ease of loading big items. And the other big consideration is reducing wind noise & drag. If you have any horizontal bars over the cab they make an awful racket. Some guys try to raise the rack up. But then you have a really tall rack and you can’t fit the truck in a garage. And your center of gravity gets frightfully high if you have a big load up there (it also looks terrible in my opinion).

So the trick is to use round tubing for your horizontals to reduce drag, and have the front bar extend 6” past the top of the windshield. This way there is no air turbulence over the roof of the cab.

In my experience there are two types of rack noises. The high pitched whistles come from wind rushing past holes, divots and crevices in the rack. So try to avoid open tube ends or exposed holes. Round tubing for the entire rack works really well, but I find it’s a little harder to secure the mostly rectangular material I transport.

The other type of wind noise tends to be a lower pitched hum or rumble. This is from turbulent air passing over the sheet metal body panels of the truck causing them to vibrate. It will typically start softer at lower speeds and increase in volume as your speed increases. Sometimes it can be the rack itself vibrating if there is a lot of wind drag over square profiles. The rack rumble typically only happens when you reach a certain speed. It tends to get softer when you speed up or slow down. It seems to occur when the wind vibrations meet the resonating frequency of the rack.

Noisy racks can drive you nuts.

Nice setup Rachunter. It looks like you have a knack for metalwork.

OZ, Do you think I should bother with the bed mounting plates? I think I might reassess the floor mount situation when I have the upper rack in place. If I recall, your 1/4" plate bed rim caps only tie into the bedrail system. How solid does it feel when there’s a load up there and you hit a bump?

 

Tac ,

my overhead set up is still on the drawing board , I just have the headache rack directly behind the cab at the moment so not much help on your question . Your side rail setup is awesome , I'm going to be going with aluminium for my cap rails , I think the worry about attaching everything down to the bed frame is valid to an extent but you have to ask yourself how much weight do you really intend to carry up there ? My old steel rack on my ranger held a ton of material but way more than I would ever put on this truck , you know how it is when your are top heavy and overloaded you feel like a boat bobbing around in the waves .

I think that if you are only realistically going to be carrying 300-400 lbs up there , and the rack is more for ease of carrying longer timbers , ladders etc , then your current caps will do the job as is , I am not completely following the way you have the cab end of the caps secured , I will go back through the thread in a bit , but even secured into the rail system , all of the load is straight down and your rails do a great job of dispersing the load over the entire side of the bed .

Your desciptions of the wind noise brought back a few memories , my poor old ranger actually had a sort of crease in the paint directly under the front horizontal crossmember from the turbulent air , and it definitely howled in the cab at times , so your point about getting ahead of the windshield is a good one and I agree that the round tubing is much better for wind noise . My dilemma now is that I am considering getting a Leer XQ cap , and I might make my rack so that the cap can be on at the same time as the rack , which means making a rail cap that goes around the front as well as the sides to create a level area for the canopy and extend the rail cap out and down a bit to accept tubing upright members . I seem to remember another member truck pic with a similar set up . I will see if I can find it and get it in here so you know what I am talking about .

One last thought , my old steel rack served me on my old truck for 14 years ! , but in that time I overloaded it constantly . What i did discover by that though is that , unlike the front (cab end ) set of uprights , the rears really have no lateral restraint at the bottom to combat a spreading motion of the back of the box when the rack is loaded . When you have a heavy ( or too heavy ) load up top and you hit some bumps , the load forces down and out on the rear uprights with only the tailgate latches to keep the box sides from spreading . I managed to eventually break the box and bed of my old truck in this manner , just like folding a piece of metal back and forth , eventually it can't handle it anymore . Also not the intended use for the tailgate . I would suggest you make an allowance for some type of detachable crossing bar to go from rear post to post when you intend to put the heavy stuff up top , you might be suprised to see how tight it gets when you add some weight on the rack . Just a thought ,

Keep up the good work Tac ,

OZ

 

Tac , this is similar to what I would be doing as an attachment for my post to rail connection so the Leer cap could be on the truck at the same time as the rack .

OZ

 

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I have the same situation: cap and ladder rack. I will send you the same photo package.

 

That’s a really good idea to add a cross bar at the bottom of the back to prevent the tail from spreading. But now it means one more thing I need to fabricate. I would like to have it very easily removable and stow securely somewhere out of the way.

I think I have a few ideas already on how to do it.

Thanks for that suggestion. It’s definitely something that makes a ton of sense that I would have missed.

OZ,

Crooked Beat sent me a bunch of photos of his rack over cap setup. Here’s a link that shows you the basics of what he had made as bedrails.

http://www.expeditionportal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=29760

and here’s a photo he sent me of the interior mounting solution.



If you have the ability to work with metal I can think of a few ways to improve on CB’s design so you can have a longer inner horizontal flange to hold down the cap, and a second inner vertical flange to receive hardware from the factory bedrails.

CB,

I hope you don’t mind me posting some of your photos. You seem to be understandably upload challenged on this forum. But they’re very helpful shots.

 

Upload all the photos you want!. For some reason my mac does not like the forum software for uploading.

My solution to the clamps was to use a few unistrut pieces carefully ground down. If you look at the geometry of the 3/8" bolt, it "kicks" the clamp outward to hold the cap down. They have worked great for me. I have tried to strike a balance between weight and utility. The cap manufacturer usually only uses two clamps per side. I used four each side. My complete rack system is just under 160 pounds.

CB

 

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Anyone know of a rack that just goes over the bed? I want the rounded ends to be on both side of the rack. I saw one the other day and it was really cool.

Brent

 

http://www.tacomaworld.com/forum/2nd-gen-tacomas/48594-bed-mount-gear-basket-yakima.html

Is this along the lines of what you were looking for ?

 

I send you a few emails of photos

 

Starting to look like something

 

Tac ,

hardcore !

Still not following how the cab side is attached , can you enlighten me . CB sent me his pic collection , awesome resource . I was thinking about the rear spreader brace and wondered if you could make it up so that it could be stored attached post to post at the cab end and then lifted off to be dropped in at the back when needed . Could be a good way to keep it secured but handy .

Looking good ,

OZ

 

http://www.rackitinc.com/standardrack.html