Day 159 / 2016 - Adding Storage

As we travel the road we seem to have accumulated more stuff. Since starting out amongst the items(we don't mention the souveniers) we have purchased a ladder, porch extension to the annex and additional tent poles.

Because some of these are long items the only place to put them is in the front boot. The perplexing conundrum with the boot is the thing you need always seems to work its way to the bottom then you have to pull everything out to get to it. My other gripe was more stuff in the boot equals more weight on the towball which was already heavy enough.

There were reasons for our purchases, the ladder because we needed to access the roof to clean the solar panel. The poles we bought because when our awning blew off we used a shade screen while waiting for a relacement and and needed somthing to support the screen. The porch helps keeping the sun of the front annexe wall since some caravan parks don't allow gazebos.

The ladder was at the botton of the boot and I had to pull everything out to get to it and needed a dry reasonably clean place to dump everthing while the ladder was out. When the ladder went back in everything went in on top again. I really wanted to easly get to the ladder without disturbing everthing else so we needed an alternative storage location.

We looked at a few options such as mounting it along the chassis or cable tie it to the back bumper finally we came to the conclusion of adding another storage tube and for weight distribution the back bumper seemed the ideal place. Now we already had one storage tube on top of the bumper the problem was there wasn't any room for a second. I looked underneath for mounting and realised the rear bumper was adjustable. We only needed another 60 mm between the bumper and wall and there was plenty of adjustment so problem solved extend the bumper out and mount the tube between the bumper and the wall just below the existing pole tube.

Looking at purchasing a complete tube kit from Camec the price was about $130.00 + delivery and the way I wanted to mount it would need addtional brackets anyway. Purchasing the parts from local hardware cost $105.00 for everything including a pot of PVC glue. I used 150 mm stormwater pipe as well as a press on endcap to seal one end and a threaded endcap for access at the other. The parts list finished off with galvanised shelving brakets, white hoop brackets, threaded rod and nuts.

Loosening fixing nuts underneath the bumper was moved out by about 75 mm then the nuts retighten again (don't want the bumper to fall off). We didn't want to extend to far out because of pivoting weight. The shelving brackets were held onto the bumper bar using threaded rod bent into a U shape. Unfortunately we could not find U bolts to match the hole centres of the shelving brackets so had to improvise. Cutting more threaded rod into short lengths they were used to support the white hooped brackets which in turn clamped around the pipe. The threaded rod holds the tube in position with the galvanised brackets supporting most of the weight.   

Gluing the tube endcap hardware on and after waiting for it to dry we then slid the tube through the hoop brackets untill it was evenly spaced across the back. Tightning all the nuts up we checked the clearance between the pipe and the back wall of the van. It looked close but we are not anticipating large amounts of bumper movement. If movement becomes a problem we can put a dob of silicone to bind the underside of the tube to the bracket.