Prinsu Access Cab Install

Thanks I'll keep checking back.

 

I came up just a tad bit short on insulation material for the roof so I picked up an additional 24 sq ft to finish, which will be enough to do both front doors next spring if not more. The deck seal placement is right above the driver, just to the left of the overhead console. This allowed for easy routing of the light bar wires along the existing factory wiring down the Left A pilar through the fire wall to the Pelfreybuilt fuse block pannel that will go in next spring. It's getting too cold and I spend winters in Florida while the truck stays here.



The deck seal is designed for boats and so it comes with screws that can be screwed into plastic, wood, carbon fiber, or similar material used in boat construction. Because the roof of our trucks is so thin the threads would easily strip the holes out if you used them. I bought a few 3/4 inch long bolts and nuts to replace the screws. The seal comes with an adhesive foam weather strip that goes between the seal and the application. I applied an additional layer of silicone just in case.







I drilled the hole in the rubber puck for the wiring off center to leave room for additional wiring down the road, though I don't have plans for anything. In the picture above the harness is just flaping in the breeze, it will be properly secured. There is no way this thing is leaking. The rubber around the wire is supper tight and the unit is torqued down well with that silicone layer.

Here's a shot of the inside.


there are quick dissconnects above the cab and immediately below the cab. All the wiring fit in nicely and becuse it follows existing lines I hope to not have any road noise from it bouncing around. I have everything put back together on the inerior and only need to re wire my electrical now. I have aux rear backup lights, bed lights, 3 front HID Floods, and the light bar now that need to get reworked through the blue seas fuse block.

Overal the PrInSu rack install was fun. It helps that I got over drilling through the truck many years ago when I put the snorkel on, otherwise I can see how it could be intimidating/scarey. This project added 17 holes bringin the total to 27 holes I've put in her over 11 years of ownership. Thanks @zscott

 

I like that. What size Scanstrut Deck Seal did you use? They have them at Amazon.

 

It's the DS30-P. The DS-Multi is BAD ASS and I wish I had enough electrical shit to justify buying it at 3X the price of the DS30. The Multi has an aluminum housing opposed to a plastic composite and a charcoal finish that I dig.

Someone on these forums installed a DS-Mutli, not sure what thread it is in, but only for one wire which is a waste of $ and space.

 

Amazon has the DS30-p for $20.90. They have the multi also. Thanks. Thiny the one you used will take an antenna wire and lite bar wire?

 

Shouldn't have an issue. It comes with several rubber pucks with pre-sized cuttouts but also comes with a solid puck you can drill to customize your application. Plenty of room to drill two holes for an antenna and light bar.

 

This whole thread has sold me on the idea of PrinSu racks. I carry surfboards (longboards) and they look stupid on the front or on the back of an AccessCab with a shell. I usually just slide them in the back of the bed with the shell door cinched down with a rubber bungy cord. A wetsuit pads everything. 4' of board hanging out the back. Lame. Anyway, with these racks, you could put the board anywhere you want. So sick. So sold. Install looks pretty easy to do on a 2007, no airbag crap to deal with. Calling and ordering next week......... What is the wait time?


Why can't you just bolt this straight through the roof with stainless nuts and bolts? No Nutserts?

 

You could, just use fender washers on the inside. I thought about it but decided to use the Rivnuts.

 

Same same, I thought about it also. I went ahead and used the nutserts because the interior surface is not flat. Depending on where your mount your PrInSu there will be various angles and bends in the sheet metal. The nutserts smash up and conform to those odd angles. It's also easier to make the nutserts water tight IMO. Overall the nutsert is very sturdy, especially when there are 12 of them.

I think I waited 5-6 weeks? I really don't remember.

 

There was a 3 week wait on shipping - I had ordered it the last week of September 2015, and it shipped middle of October.

I've had my access cab rack on my 2010 since February 2016 - love the rack, even though i haven't actually put it to use for anything yet.. it's certainly distinctive.

It took a while to work up nerve to do the install. I was tripping over the rack in my front hall for a few months before install. I ended up spending a whole lot of time with painters tape, tape measure and various other garage bench toys plotting out where holes would go... and then quadruple-checking everything from beginning to end.

I started with a metal punch, then to 1/8", and on up from there. Drill points were down to the mm. Incremental, slow speed, and lubing the drill bit to keep things from heating up.

When i first measured the rack for pertinent drill points, i did it pre-assembled off the truck - I measured and marked those dead center down the body seam.

I agonized over exact placement of the rack in relation to the roof/windshield measurement off of the front fairing.. i probably spent an hour, on about a 3mm range of travel, going front to back, and then front again, and again, and again... and then i took the lap of faith, and drilled the first holes which would determine whether i had a Prinsu equipped truck, or a good start to a convertible conversion.

I too also have a lot of airbag crap, and wiring runs under that head-liner - The irony here is that i never did drop that head-liner, although i intended to .. 3x so far. It scares me to mess with that. I did pull it away on the sides, after the fact to get the metal shavings out of the roof and airbags, but never actually dropped the thing. Once the install was done, and the interior was squared away with the panels - i noted that the front most mount bolts leave double Frankenstein bolt indents into the head-liner. The front bolts as supplied, could likely have been the next standard measurement shorter in length.

Once the drilling was done, the mostly assembled rack was put onto the roof, and bolted in place. Everything fit up right the first time, as the measurements indicated.

The last two rivet-nuts through the roof at the very rear, was critical in spacing. Both the airbag, and the structural box member in there, would be a serious fitment issue for the last bolts, if it was off by more than 1/4". I know i had to finesse the airbag out of the way while inserting the rivet-nuts, on the drivers side particularly. I knew about the wiring runs through the a-pillar .. i just went slow with the drill, letting the bit do the cutting with no downward pressure. I found wiring in interference with the rivet-nuts - but again, gently routing them out of the way through gentle persuasion with a screwdriver tip, got the job done, without getting too fussy with the head-liner..

One of the actual uses of my Prinsu rack, is that i have a 180deg fish-eye rear-view camera mounted on the trailing edge of the last cross-bar, handy for surveillance of congested traffic situations. I ran the wiring for it up the A-Pillar, through the roof liner (again, actually avoiding removing it, again!) and then popped an additional 3/8" hole into the roof seam for the wiring immediately behind the last rivet-nut on the drivers-side. Wiring runs under the OEM rubber gasket and pops out to be zip-tied to the rack and routed correctly. Everything is amply gooped up with silicone caulk squeezed into all potential points of leakage, and then exterior reinforced with RTV, to also secure the sectioned OEM rubber gasket into the channel. No sign of seepage into the interior thus far, so sealant appears to be effective.

 

I've got a 2011, I dropped the headliner. So much airbag and other crap, I decided not to install. No place to drill on the rear holes. Zach made me 2 new longer sides I just got. Now I can do the install. The plusnuts scare the hell out of me, I'll use rivnuts from Marsten. How far from the front windshield is your rack?

 

I settle on that in a rather odd, but logical way - the rounded nose of the side plates measure to be prefectly perpendicular with the gasket/glass seam of the windshield. I used a protractor kit's 90 degree plastic ruler to make sure that it measured 90 degrees, perpendicular to the gasket/glass seam break.

 

I'll try that. I had trouble settling on a spot.
Any wind noise?

 

Headliner comes out in 10 minutes...Sometimes you just gotta go for it

 

Initially, yes. There was a distinctive slip-stream rush/whistling coming primarily from the passenger side. Dyna-matting the truck roof would definitely be worth it, i think, after the roof-rack.

I settled for an experimental fix, and then a mechanical fix. The first involved use of a pool-noodle cut down to fit on the trailing edge of the front fairing, so that it mostly sealed that space for windstream to travel under the rack through that space. It settled the noise down some, but the right hand side was still rushing and whistling.

End fix was to drop that front fairing to within close proximity to the roof itself, and to affix 'winglets' into those stylized end cut-outs at either end of the spoiler bar. Painted the winglets black, and the McGyver fix also double-dutied to cover over the laser-cut Prinsu-Logo from behind.. i left that in the natural stainless steel to highlight the Prinsu cut-out, while disabling it's potentially annoying kazoo-like capabilities.

The overall sound level is reduced about 80% of that i started out with, on first install. It's there, but turning up the radio a bit, very tolerable.

 

Do you have the Noise Reducing Edge Trim mounted on the bottom of the air dam?

 

Yeah .. i know it's easier than it looks - I think it was popping a few fuses, that initially intimidated me - i didn't detach the battery first, and spiked the headliner light fuses, when i did some earlier headliner work to run wiring at one point. It became a task that i subconsciously avoided from then on.

 

Negative

 

That's supposed to help a lot.

 

Wait time from PrinSu?