What have we here? :)
On Saturday morning we dropped into TJM and picked up a set of MaxTrax recovery tracks (along with a tyre repair kit just in case!). Since we'll be hitting Moreton island in summer, at midday, with two cars (and one trailer) loaded to the hilt, it's probably prudent that we have some way of quickly extracting a vehicle should it "fail to proceed" on the hot, soft sand. And MaxTrax fit the bill perfectly!
They're modelled on the steel (PSP) or aluminium (PAP) recovery tracks that Army vehicles have used for a long time, except made out of bright orange poly plastic so they're lightweight and easy to find.
Basically, if the vehicle gets stuck in the sand, you can use the end of the track like a shovel and clear some of the sand in front of the wheels. Then you jam the tracks under the front of the wheels, engage 4Lo, and drive up onto the tracks and out of the bog! Easy, quick, simple - choose any 3! They're not a golden bullet for every situation, but for sand driving, not much beats them. They're a bit pricey, but they're the sort of thing you buy once and have for the rest of your life, and anyway, it's much cheaper than having a local come and pull you out with a tractor, or worse - having the incoming tide take your car!
But therein lies the problem with them. They're going to be used when you're in trouble. So you need the quickly and easily accessible. They're used to help you drive out of mud or sand, so when you're finished using them, they're going to be pretty dirty. You don't want to have to go hunting for them through the back of the car or unpacking anything to get to them, and you definitely don't want to put them back in the car when they're filthy. So how do you carry something so big and so orange?
Easily, as it turns out!
Up on the roof rack like that is a perfect spot for them. They're handy to get to, they won't dirty the car if they're muddy, and they're nice and light, so you won't notice them up there. And having them bolted to the side means that to get at them we won't need to disturb our tent or other gear packed inside the basket.
So - how did we get them there? We started with a 1m length of 25mm x 25mm x 1mm aluminium box section, a 1m length of 10mm stainless rod (How expensive is that stuff! Yikes! If you're doing this and want to save a CONSIDERABLE amount of money, use gal rod. It'll be just as good, easier to work with, and you'll be able to keep your left kidney), some gal U-bolts (since no one in Cairns has stainless u-bolts, it seems) and some cutting tools.
We cut the ali box section to 2 x 330mm lengths. Then drilled holes for the u-bolts and the stainless rod at the correct spots. when assembled, it looks something like this:
You can see how the top rod is longer than the bottom rod - that's because the tracks sit against the bottom rod and against the top tube of the roof rack - hence the top rod needs to be long enough to pass through the top holes in the tracks. FYI - the bottom rod is 95mm long, the top rod, 135mm. Stainless nuts on the stainless rod, gal nuts on the gal u-bolts. Yes - and there's ali in there as well. No one ever said you needed to stick to the one material when building something!
After knocking up the prototype bracket, we were pretty confident it would work.
Both rods protrude enough to hold the tracks in place, and make it nice and easy to get them on or off. Here's a shot of the back side, so you can see how it works from that angle:
Simple - easy - effective - light : I like it! We copied the initial bracket and made another one tonight. It's very simple when you've got a template to work from! The hardest part was cutting the stainless rod, and trimming the threaded ends of the gal u-bolts. I suspect I've burnt the heel of my palm from the heat generated by hacksawing off one section of stainless rod - we'll see tomorrow whether I'm right or not.
As an aside - you've got to be careful when cutting the stainless rod. Stainless is finicky to work with, and "grabby", so you need to ensure that once you've finished cutting, you finish off the cut ends and clean the thread up. You do this with a normal steel nut, and twist it on and off the end of the thread a number of times, both whilst pushing the nut onto the thread as hard as you can, as well as while pulling the nut away from the thread as hard as you can. This ensures that both the top and bottom sides of the threads have been cleaned up and cut nicely. Do this, and you'll have no worries at all in the future. Miss that step, and you'll have the devil's delight in getting stainless nuts on.
With both brackets on, the tracks are held up nice and securely. They're super easy to get on and off, and the brackets, whilst being very light, are massively strong enough to hold the 7kg weight of the two tracks. I was originally going to use the 25x25 box section steel I had left over from the battery cradle, but the ali is so much lighter it's not funny. One bracket made out of steel would weigh more than both brackets AND the tracks combined!
So what's next?
I need to cut some large "washers" out of the left-over ali checkerplate I have. These washers will sit above the tracks, and the stainless wingnuts I bought ($5 EACH! SERIOUSLY! If you're going to do this, just use gal stuff!!!) will bolt down onto them and secure the tracks nicely in place. If we need to, I've got some extra M10 stainless nuts, and can put a couple torqued up together onto the rods at specific positions so we don't over-tighten the wingnuts down and bend the tracks. But I don't think we'll need them at this stage.
I've also got to disassemble both brackets, and install stainless and gal spring washers on all the bolt connections, so that it won't rattle itself apart. I'll hopefully be able to duck out tomorrow and pick up these, so will be able to do that tomorrow night. At the same time as doing this, I'll be putting some of the left-over rubber mat between the brackets and the roof basket where they touch, so that the brackets won't wear though the powdercoat finish on the basket. But I fear the rubber matt I've got may be too thick, so I might need to improvise.
And as a finishing touch, I'm going to get my hands on some spray etch primer, and paint the gal and ali sections flat black. I'll leave the stainless rod and nuts nice and shiny, but with the majority of the brackets the same colour as the rack, I'm hopeful that it will all blend in together for a professional finish that we can leave attached to the car all the time, instead of needing to bolt them on and off all the time. We'll see how it looks when it's done, but that's my plan. The good thing about that is that the rods don't protrude out from the car at all, and there's basically no likelihood of you being able to hit your head on the brackets or anything protruding from them. So hopefully they should be right to stay attached 100% of the time.
And last but not least, I want to pick up a heavy-duty bicycle "chain" lock - the sort with the cylinder barrel on the end of the heavy rubber-encased steel wire loop. That will let us lock our expensive tracks to the car when we're travelling, but be an easy solution to remove when we think we might need them. I was going to go all high-tech with drilling holes through the rod so that we could thread a little padlock through, but in the end, this just seemed just a simpler solution. And if it eventually rusts shut, we can chop it off with some bolt cutters, throw it away, and get a new one!
Check back later in the week to see the completed product - but so far, I'm pretty happy with it!
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