Posted on by Bryan

Bed height crossbars

With the new bike, I needed a better way to transport it since I’ve just been strapping it in to the bed of the truck. I didn’t want a hitch rack, or a roof rack, nor did I want to put it up on top of my existing rack.

“Inside corner” bracket and spring nuts were used to connect to the Nissan Utilitrack.

So, after some Google and Pinterest research, I decided to build some crossbars that utilized the Utilitrack in the bed of the truck. To those bars, we’ll attach some bike racks and we’ll still be able to store other gear below the bars.

Cone nuts connected the Superstrut to the inside corner bracket. Could have used spring nuts here instead.

Construction was easy, measure the width between your bed rails and as long as it’s no wider than 60 inches then you can build the bars with a single piece of Superstrut. My bars would up being 58 inches long. Details can be seen in the photos.

The crossbars work! Now we need to get a rack that will allow us to leave the front wheel on. I took the rear cross bar and risers off of the taller rack. We’ll see how often we find ourselves needing to put it back on.

Materials

  • 1x Superstrut (10 ft) $21
  • 4x Inside corner $12
  • 8x Cone nuts (two 5 packs) $9
  • 4x Spring nuts (one 5 pack) $4
  • 12x 3/8” by 1” hex bolts $3
  • 12x split/lock washers $3
  • TOTAL $52+tax
It didn’t fit facing forward, so let’s try it facing backward.
The taller rack had to come off in order to not interfere with the bikes when using the new Rocky Mounts Tomahawk racks.

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