ROOF CARRIER FOR THE AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

With all the appurtenances on our roof, there was no room whatsoever to add a conventional roof rack or commercially-designed carry case such as a Thule, SportRack, etc.

The solar panels are occupying Airstream's unconventional roof rack.  

However, out of sheer necessity, I'm in the process of squeezing every last cubic inch of storage space until it screams, and I discovered a neat little slot for this particular item.

It's my new inflatable kayak, minus the paddles, seats, and foot pump.   

It fits this space like it was made for it.

Under the leading edge of the solar array.  The kayak is a cheapie - it was $75 including paddles and seats.  I wouldn't want to store anything really expensive on this roof because I haven't devised any way to secure it.  Not that I expect that anyone would climb 9 feet in the air to get it. 

Furthermore, it's a boat, duh.  I don't have to worry about it getting wet if its on the roof.  Don't have to worry about making a carrier be waterproof.  

Side view.  That's the roof a/c unit at photo right.  Talk about a triple-duty space - solar array, a/c, and kayak.  

Once the kayak was cinched into a bundle with compression straps, it was surprisingly easy to haul it onto the roof.  We carry a Telesteps 1400E ladder at all times, and I'm accustomed to working on our Airstream Interstate's roof, so getting this on and off was a piece of cake for me (minus the paddles, seats, and foot pump, the kayak itself only weighs about 20 pounds).

Obviously, though, I couldn't just stuff the kayak in this available space and be done with it.  I needed to compact the kayak, cover it, and strap it down securely.  This blog post briefly describes the cover that I created to custom-fit this area.

These were my materials for this project, almost.

I know this sounds ridiculous, but I really like Harbor Freight's tarps.  They are supposed to be a "discount" store (read: cheap, cheap, cheap) but I like their silver tarps better than the offerings at the more upscale big box chains.  It's a 9 mil two-sided silver tarp.  You'd be amazed how difficult that is to find - most chain stores are still carrying conventional blue, or tarps that have only one side silvered.

I did NOT use the smaller strap cinchers that are shown here, just the parachute buckles, four of them.  And I had that belt webbing leftover from my custom computer table and suspended under-cabinet shelves projects.  The color coordinated perfectly with the silver tarp.

For once, I conceded to use outdoor gauge thread. It tends to mess up my sewing machine because it is too heavy and resilient.  But for this object, clothing weight thread would not suffice.  I did snap one needle on my sewing machine as a result of this decision. 

Whenever I'm faced with a custom #vansizedsewing predicament, I do my usual thing:  I start by making a tarp envelope.

I fit the tarp around the kayak with the opening along the long axis for ease of stuffing and stripping (= longshoring vernacular for adding to and removing from, typically used in reference to intermodal containers, said the industrial consultant).    

Here's where this project represented a significant departure from my ideal scenario, however.  Because I was going to integrate four attachment straps, and I mean integrate, as in sew all straps directly to the body of the carrier for strength, I had to position and attach all such findings before sewing up the sides to form the envelope.  If I didn't approach it this way, I wouldn't have proper access to what ultimately needed to be sewn to the body of the carrier.  For this reason, I could not engage in my usual iterative pattern of sewing, re-fitting and adjusting, sewing the next step of the project, etc.  This was a one-shot, all-or-nothing deal owing to those project logistics.

I mean, think about it.  A person could take an ordinary cylindrical dry bag, such as is used in whitewater rafting, and cram it into that same available space.  But then the hold straps would simply have to go around the bag, not be part of the bag.  That didn't appeal to me for safety reasons, because a bundled kayak is not rigid, and with road vibrations, is very capable of migrating itself around the roof in a way that it should not be allowed to do.

Edit 20170726:  After I published this post, Instagram fed me the following image, which is a perfect example of what happens when objects are not sufficiently strapped to a roof:

Wanting to avoid any such scenario, I came up with this instead:

The rationale will become more apparent once we switch from a 2D to a 3D rendition.  The second trio of Velcro strips for closing the envelope are under the right edge, hidden from view.  

Here it is in envelope form with the sides sewn up and the three mated Velcro pairs of strips visible.

Now you're starting to get the picture.  The belt webbing is extremely long in each of the four attachment points because I wasn't able to refine the fit in real time, for the reasons explained above.  Hence I left myself a lot of extra length, just in case.  Too bad about the waste, because this stuff is expensive, but whatever. 

Now you can see the largely-finished morphology even better, because in this pic, I've placed the kayak inside of the carrier (during the execution of this project, I joked to my husband, "Be sure not to trip over that dead body I left on the kitchen floor.").  In this pic, I have not yet fitted the package and trimmed the web belting to better reflect the final positions of the parachute buckles yet - that had to be done in situ, on the roof.

You can see that the lip of this tarp envelope folds backwards toward the roof a/c unit.  That way, on-rushing air cannot force its way beneath it and try to tear the envelope open.

The front two attachments will clasp around the 80/20 aluminum frame bar that supports the solar panel array.  The two side belts will buckle around Airstream's longitudinal roof rack support members.  Those are intended to maintain strict positioning only.  The weight of the kayak will actually rest directly on the roof.

Dog be like, "Damn, it's hot out there!"  And it was - once again, close to 100 degrees, and you'll excuse me for not getting sick of complaining about it, because it never tires of being a burden on us (Houston in mid-July, ugh).  I had to wait until the sun got low in the sky to get my money shots because it was too hot for me to even put my hand on any part of the roof framing to steady myself as I was up there. 

Because this was an "all or nothing" one-shot sewing deal, I did not have leave to refine the positions of any of those four attachment web belt strips.  I put them where I thought they made sense, and resolved to simply refine what I could once I got the whole shootin' match up onto the roof.  The main thing, again, is that all attachment belts are fully integrated.  They are sewn directly to the carrier, to ensure that the whole thing will not come undone while the van is traveling at high speed.  Each individual sewing stitch may not be that strong, but there are a lot of stitches in this creation, and cumulatively, they should make for a device that should withstand 70 mph headwinds for thousands of miles.

And now for the money shots.

Very nondescript.  Looks like it goes with everything else that is up there. 

Side buckle. Rainwater tends to gush down the channel closest to the shoulder, so I wanted this carrier to lift up a bit at the ends, so as to not trap water on the roof.  

View from the side. 

It's not one of my most elegant projects, obviously.  I wanted to leave as many tarp grommets exposed as possible, just in case I prove to have an unforeseen need for them.  But it doesn't look elegantly finished as a result.

I haven't road-tested it yet because we are simultaneously working on installing an EasyStart electronic device so that we can run our coach a/c from the lithium battery bank, so the solar panels are currently unhinged at the rear.  I'll re-edit this post if I have any follow-up wisdom to offer.

Rather than closing with a meme as I often do, here's a picture of our riotous subtropical summer sky, the one I saw while I was up on the roof completing this job.