What do you do when the only cars you have are both smallish sedans and you need to get 16 foot pieces of lumber home? Why you build a roof rack of course! To reinforce the roof for the upcoming skylights, we needed to get a bunch of 16 foot long 2×6’s. Would have been nice to just rent a truck to get them, but the truck they have to rent at Lowes only has an 8 foot bed, and no roof rack. The best option would have been to have them deliver it, however that was rather expensive, and this way seemed more fun.
Building the rack was pretty straight forward. However I did hit a few bumps along the way. My car has some nice nut-plates in the roof, which would make bolting down the rack easy and secure. Since my car is German though, these bolts were metric. This means that despite the massive collection of screws, nails and bolts I inherited from my grandfather, I didn’t have any that fit. Fortunately after some hunting I found the proper M6 bolts at Lowes. I then wrapped some 2×6’s in carpet to protect the roof, bolted them down, and then screwed some 2×4’s down to those. All in all it worked pretty well, although the curvature of the roof made things a bit difficult, and of course it looked quite ghetto/white trashy.