So welcome back friends. So there was a lot of the OU that wanted me to do a quick video on how we fabricated the double motorcycle carrier for the back of the adventure van. The reason why we decided to design our own and to fabricate it was the it wasn't we really wasn't anything available that I could find that was of quality. There's a lot of double carriers out there and they're relatively inexpensive when you start looking at them. They're pretty dodgy. There are a lot of them are overseas made. They're not very heavy duty and I wouldn't trust putting a whole lot on there. Maybe a single carrier you can get by with one of those cheap ones if you have a small motorcycle but for a double one especially going off road. I just couldn't find anything so that left us no other choice than to kind of design our own. With the idea of having a worry free carrier. So let me bring in here close I'll show you kind of the how we built it and I also we're not quite done with it also want some input from you guys for a couple things that are still unfinished. So let's take a look and see if we can't figure out the perfect solution together. Quick walk around here just to give you an overall impression of what we did and why we did it. You can see here the whole thing starts off the main spine of the whole thing. This is the receiver portion that goes into the van is heavy duty. It's a quarter wall meaning it's a two by two stock square stock quarter inch wall thickness. That's pretty burly stuff and that is carrying the whole weight. So one thing I wanted to do was to have almost kind of a stadium seating meaning that the bike on the back was a little bit higher because this sticks out so far. That if you don't raise these things up then you have a problem when you pull out of like gas stations that have dips the bikes will drag you know some of those long arbys you'll see they have actually wheels on the back of them. So we wanted to avoid all of that so what we did was we put this big four inch channel stock and this is also quarter wall thickness. That has a little bit of five degree angle on it so that is all very heavy duty the other thing we had done was it had everything boxed in. So there are no open ends on this thing apart from right here on the receiver everything else is all boxed in. And the reason being is that bees and hornets and all sorts of nasty things like to make nest in these. So when you pick them up you you you'll get stung and you'll find things that are you know that want to get you so everything is capped. So going underneath here let me show you get up under here. Here you can see another angle of the of the spine of it so that's that's that channel everything all boxed in and gusseted now this is these are I think this is three sixteenths or eighth wall. And these are just the gussets that go out and are tied in to the cross braces there so you can see which are for the tie downs. But no open ends everything boxed everything boxed here very very nice very very sturdy and I don't see any problems and there is it's pretty high. So it's raised up pretty high I put airbags on the back of the van that gets it up even higher and I tested it out and it doesn't seem to want to drag on anything. Another issue I had was I could not find rails. This is the rails that the bikes that said that were heavy duty enough. There's a lot of these available on the market but they're very thin they're they're like a gauge metal and they're kind of designed to bolt onto a flatbed trailer they're not designed to carry the waiter to be a structural element of it. So we ended up having to build our own so we got eighth inch strap two there's just two inch and this is six inch and we made our own we welded everything all up and then we cut this angle here bent that up and just we had to make our own there just wasn't anything available that I could do. When we put the ratchet straps on it started to pull on it even the eighth inch started to bend a little bit right here so we reinforce these ends put an extra piece on there to stiffen them up as well. So you can see the hole there in the back this is going to be for a ramp system so this is something that we're still working on and but you can see it turned out really good. It's really good it's very strong very stiff now here on the backside we also have this is all gusteted as well and tied into these guys right here and there's just no flex in it whatsoever. These are the tie downs for the strap this is what was that one by two square stalker so we capped the ends on there so that you can see no bees or anything in there and that gives a nice purchase point for the tie down straps. Also you can see on this end as well as we put another piece of eighth inch on there just to stiffen that up so when the bikes go up or the ramp pin it's going to go in here. It just was just a little bit of insurance that just made everything nice nice and strong on that ramp mount actually was pointing to the wrong side the ramp mount is going to go on the towards the van side they'll go in here. So the final thing that we're trying to try to kick around is the ability to mount two five gallon race cans. So having the gas cans inside is kind of a problem because they seem to vent even when you close them all up you can always smell the gasoline sloshing around in there and so it's just not very nice to have in the cab. So we're trying to get everything we can out on this rack that is moto related. So what I think we're going to do is we've got those white five gallon race cans that those will build some sort of a basket deal maybe with some expanded metal and those will drop in there we have to have two because Jack has a four stroke and I have a two stroke so we burn different gas. So I'm thinking a race gas can here that we can drop in there you know maybe throw a bunchy around maybe has enough weight where we don't need it one on this side one on this side. And that leads to this area right here we maybe we might also do kind of like a shallow expanded metal basket in there for tie downs and straps and all those things that kind of accumulate bungees or whatever to keep them all in one place so they're you're not losing them because it's easy to lose those things. Another question that came up is why did you build this out of steel it looks really heavy why didn't you use aluminum well I would have loved to have used aluminum that was kind of my original thought and when I started sourcing the material in the cost of it and I don't have the ability to weld aluminum to the level that would be required for this it was four four or five maybe six times the price to do it in aluminum. So that's why I didn't do it in aluminum so yes it is heavy but it's not too bad I with two of us Jack can grab one side I can grab the other side we can easily put it in and get the pin in and have it loaded up no problem but what I think that I'll do is I'll build a like out of four by four out of it. I'll build a stand for it with four casters on it and I'll back the van up in here and try to get the right height so if I could take it and just kind of like on a piano cart type of thing and just roll it in you know jiggle it in a little bit then I could load it up by myself so that that remains to be done but once the gas cans fabrications done we get the ramp deal sorted out then we'll paint and then we'll paint and paint it up and then I'll show you the finished project but I think it's going to I think it's going to work out really good I drove with it with both bikes on it around a couple hundred miles the other day in all different types of terrain and it worked really good. One problem of course that we always run into with these things is the hitches are so sloppy so we hit when we hit the speed bump one time you know the bikes are bouncing and jumping up and down so I have figured out I think I figured out a way to clamp and to tighten that down I'll share that with you too when the material comes in because that I don't like all that stuff rocking around it's kind of it's you know what would be nice is if we if trailer hitches if you had to double you know we could have two posts that come in because when you're trying to mount something you know that's sticking out on one little post I mean they do move around a lot I know there's some solutions out there everybody has kind of their take on building to better strap for that but I haven't quite found it yet. So what's next well what's next is I've been working on the whole water tank system right here so I'm I'm halfway through the cabinet build here that's going to include the water tank the 21 gallon water tank and all of the components the inverter is in the furnace and the hot water here and all of that so that's what this is right here we'll we'll cover this with the same laminate that's on the the galley but one thing it's kind of cool here is that this is going to be the outdoor shower we don't have room for an indoor shower and we don't usually go on long trips anyway so if you go to the beach it's nice to have if you have salt water on you or you just you just want to wash your hair it is rinse off we'll be able to have on demand hot water a small shower sprayer off the back so we can build or find some sort of a shower curtain type of deal or just park somewhere which remote and and you can least clean off with this here and then that'd be the hot and cold running faucet here and then the fill and I might if I can fit an air compressor in there you know maybe the air compressor chuck and that sort of thing I've just it's really been challenging trying to figure out how to fit all of this stuff in the small box but that's what I'm working on next I'll share that with you in the next video but that's it yeah so thanks for watching and we'll see you guys on the next video