Stowing Recovery Boards on Wing Bars

Dave Hansford

Forum Member
Joined
Jan 25, 2020
Messages
119
Location
New Zealand
Car Year
2008
Car Model
Outback
Transmission
4EAT
My wife and I are off to tour the Far North of New Zealand’s North Island in a month’s time, so there’ll be a bit of beach work. Given ours isn’t a proper “off road” Outback, I’ve been looking for a while for a tidy, secure way to stow recovery boards and a shovel on our Thule wing bars. I settled on this Yakima setup, which is just a pair of triangular brackets mounted into the track by two thumbwheel nuts apiece. On the back of the brackets are a pair of Yakima shovel holders which grip the shovel handle with a simple ratcheting mechanism. This setup is ideal for us, as we don’t often need to cart recovery boards around, but when we do, I don’t want them inside - ours has the ivory leather interior! These mount and unmount in minutes, so they’re perfect. One glitch is that they’re not optimised, fit-wise, for my Tred Pros. I think they’re secure enough, but you can see that it’s impossible to get the straps through the Tred Pro lanyard loops, which would’ve been ideal. A03846E4-0340-4EB7-A9CC-11915EB6BFB1.jpeg
 
NIce!
 
:ROFLMAO:
 
For what it is worth I use large rubber bands cut from old tyre tubes to hold items onto my roof racks. Tractor tyre tubes are excellent for large and awkward shaped items and car tubes good for general use. They are cheap, strong, can be cut to the size you need and last well, usually being a butyl type compound material. If more strength is required cut a wider band. Usually easily obtained from tyre dealers.
 
ateday said:
For what it is worth I use large rubber bands cut from old tyre tubes to hold items onto my roof racks. Tractor tyre tubes are excellent for large and awkward shaped items and car tubes good for general use. They are cheap, strong, can be cut to the size you need and last well, usually being a butyl type compound material. If more strength is required cut a wider band. Usually easily obtained from tyre dealers.
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Good suggestion. But these had to stow vertically, as all the other horizontal room on the wing bars is now claimed. That roof basket's empty now, but come touring time, it's full of all the crap we'd normally put inside, except that there's already a full-grown Labrador in there, and he likes to stretch out! If further proof were needed that that dog rules our life, it's that his presence in the cargo space has entirely determined the stowage of pretty much everything else... seen here are a bunch of our native kea destroying our possessions while the dog lounges unbothered in the back. We're past the point of embarrassment now...

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subyroo said:
I'm surprised they didn't destroy your cargo net. :eek:
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I know, right?. And they're protected, so you can't just smack 'em with a walking pole... (we would never do that, by the way. We quite like our kea).
 
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