After suffering clearance issues offroad at the back corners and struggling with stashing the oversized spare inside the car I finally bit the bullet. A quite patch at work gave me the spare time so I designed and built my own bar, wheel and jerry can holder. The bar is made up from lazer cut and folded 3mm plate, welded together with a stick welder at home, and painted with aerosol cans. The mounting plates bolt through the chassis rails with compression tubes and backing plates. The stub axles are machined to fit a pipe sleeve and held in place with setscrews. Finished tally up of costs was $420 for the bar, $800 for both the swing out carriers. This included all steel, bolts, ridjidij latches, stub axles, hubs, jerry can holder, lights plus paying a workshop to do the folding machining.
Many, many hours of work over about 5 weekends, but it shows what can be done at home. Another $600 would have had it blasted and powdercoated, but I couldn't justify the expense. Painting and finishing off took a good chunk of time.
The entire bar is drawn in AutoCAD, including plate developments. There are a few little errors in the drawing to be fixed after building the prototype, but otherwise it went together well.
Happy with the result. I don't think I'll sign up to do it again though.
One thing (and it may be just my eyes this early in the morning) would the location of the Jerry can holder present "Pajero" issues whereby hitching a trailer may present a problem, or opening the swing away while a trailer is connected be hindered?
I tow a boat and a box trailer so I was very careful to make sure I had clearance. It may be an issue when the trailer hitch is close to the front.
One other thing I made sure of was that I can leave the spare wheel off the carrier and still open the top tailgate. This makes life much easier around town.
One other thing to watch is that the lower tailgate will open downwards without touching the rear edge of the bar in the centre. As it is I only have 3mm clearance. More by good luck than good management.
There are a few errors on the CAD drawing to fix and the raw cad file could get shared with the Aulro community on an all care no responsibility basis.
My original goal was to do up clearer drawings, parts lists and assembly instructions so other people don't fall into some of the traps I did. It is a fairly elaborate build with a lot of details worked out along the way, so I'm not sure I can afford the time to go that far.
Watched 2 P38 rear bumpers get smashed out at Wombat on the weekend... any metal shops in Melbourne wanting to do a batch could probably make a dollar or two. Better still, Ranger Danger why don't you recoup some of your costs by coordinate group buys in each major city?
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