Pajero Owners Club of South Africa

Hi

I had a look at bostokkelos's Connect It roofrack and decided to build my own. Here are some pics. I actually stood on it this morning (I'm 100kg) and no problems.

This thing is very light, I can easily put it on the Pajero myself. I intend to use it for tent/chair/stretcher/jerrycans.

nicely done!

I cannot quite make it out, but what did you use to fit it on the rails?

Gert

I baught roof bar clamps from holdfast. You can get them from outdoorwarehouse/midas. They are rated at 75kg per bar in their normal use (150kg for both). the bars are another R700 so I decided to buy the clamps only and modified them to fit the 25mm square tubing. If you had more patience than me you could probably buy directly from holdfast for much cheaper. It would also be nice to get a triangular extrusion to fit the clamp dimensions (27-28mm instead of 25mm-wall thickness+-23mm).

If I did this again and had more time I would probably search until I could find the perfect extrusion for the bottom crossbars.

The nice thing is I can take it of in 2minutes. The brackets fasten with a bolt. I was also babysitting while building this so some of my cutting is not as straight as it could be.

Another improvement would be to have the bars powdercoated instead of painted. Although the matt black looks pretty good imo. It still needs a final coating.

I asked mayzeys to cut the aluminium for me but they stuffed it up, so just make sure if you do that because I had to fine tune what they did with a hand saw (grinders tend to wake up sleeping little boys in fits of rage)

All in all cost me about R1800, but could be quite a bit cheaper, I had some experimentation costs.

I will test it with some load and get back to you. I am a little worried that heavy load + bad road may result in bolts getting loose. Still thinking of a final backup fastening scheme...

Looks very good
Are the pajero roof rail able to support such a load, say a roof top tent?

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Probably wont hold a rooftop tent, anyways, I prefer to sleep comfortably

You could beef up the roofrack itself to hold a tent, but I I do not think the standard rails would last long. You could remove the covers and use the bolts to fit some kind of bracket, would require some custom work. the other option is to have heavy duty rails fitted, but this alone costs more than what I paid. Depends on what you want to do and are willing to pay

ThekNack,

Looks good but I hope that you realize that the Pajero pillars are plastic and not very strong. The problem with roofracks is that the the downward load is NOT the problem but the side-ways and forward/rearward loads. In other words, the DYNAMIC LOADS - when you brake, turn and hit unseen or unplanned bumps and excavations.

Cloyd

I'm aware of that, I just resoned like this: If I were to buy two roofrails and load up what they speked (150kg) I would not even think about it not holding. So as long as I stay below that I should be OK.

the brackets also have rubber linings which should help a bit with this (damping), and I am still thinking of ways to improve the weight handeling.

Any ideas?

I used front runner's load bars, it has a groove where you slide in a 8mm bolt, and I drilled a fastened the RR with those bolts