I've been thinking about putting a roof basket/rack on my Blazer. I've been looking at prices for some and they're pretty expensive. I'm willing to weld and make my own but I'm not sure where to start. If anyone has any suggestions as to one that they like or just general suggestions, that would be great. I Don't want it to catch a lot of wind so I've been thinking about putting a wind deflector (thats what its called right lol) at the front but I also want to be able to mount lights. What size would you recommend the basket to be? Also, can I keep the stock racks on or should I buy aftermarket ones?

I also am interested in making my own grille guard so suggestions for that would be nice too!

 

Following!

 

I don't know how but, I just realized, well remembered, that I had a sun roof. If I do the "standard" 45"x50", is it going to cover it or is it going to stop before it? Also, should I do 1in tubing or 3/4in tubing when building this? For those of you that have a basket rack, do you wish the bottom would be like a steel mesh or smaller bars going across so you can put smaller things without it falling through and give it more tie down points?

 

If you make your own, you can make it to work with your sun roof, and to a design that will look good and function the way you'd like. If you have the time and tools that'd be the way to go imo.

personally I've been considering using 1 inch square tube to build one. 1/8th wall should work well for round or square tube... square or round is just personal preference though. I prefer square

 

Thats got me thinking about round or square tubing now. A lot of racks that I was looking at are round so I wonder how easy to get attachments (like for lights or if you wanted to have a shovel attachment, etc) to fit the square tubing would be. I know you can make your own attachments but that can mean a lot more work. If you do make your own, are you keeping the stock roof rack bars and just attach it to them or are you going to upgrade?

 

I was going to start from scratch and just use the factory anchor points

 

square tubing = square cuts, 45s and 90s - round tubing = ends are cut with a cup to meet the attaching tubing - for me it would be square tubing as less work fabing

 

It's pretty easy to weld light tabs onto square tubing. I thought about making my own rack, but there were about a million different ones on Amazon that were pretty reasonably priced, so I just picked one I liked and bought it. I also bought clamp-on light mounts for the size tubing the rack was made of and installed them at the joints for extra strength. Like most racks, mine was meant to attach to the OEM roof rack, but I took off the stock rack and made my own mounts to keep its profile low.


Not the best picture, but you can kind of see the roof rack.

 

Wow, killer ride, Tom A!

I just went on Craigslist, found one I liked, talked the guy down a bunch, and sanded/repainted the thing.

 

Thanks!