A Burning Man Blog by Mike

The Yurt Rack is finally complete! Now I don’t need to buy a trailer and hitch for the wagon! That saved me some serious cash! It looks very solid. The side benefit is that there is a significant amount of storage space under the Yurt Rack for carrying shade structures.

These are the structural aluminum brackets that Bill gave me years ago. They sure came in handy. This bracket had to be sunken into the stud because all three brackets are not mounted in a straight line due to their placement on the roof by the factory. This mod allowed the stud to be aligned in a straight line.

The front bracket had to be sawed in half with my horizontal band saw since the 2 mounting studs were spaced much further apart from the factory. It did a great job. Don set this saw up for me years ago and it does such a nice job.

This rear bracket did not come with any slots for mounting so I just drilled a single hole. Under each bracket mount there is a 1/8″ thick reinforced rubber pad to help spread the load out on the roof.

After being motivated by how Cowboy and Connie mounted their yurt and large shade structure to the roof of their 4 door sedan, it struck me that Bill had given me some large structural aluminum pieces way back when we were conceiving of our combat robot, Max Wedge. As it turns out I had a perfect assortment of these parts to make a very solid roof rack. Here is a bad cell phone pic of what I discovered today. A 2 x 4 will run lengthwise and attach to the 3 mounts on each side. Then by machining a 1 x 4 notch across the top of the 2 x 4’s I can put three 1 x 4’s across the roof to support the underside of the yurt. I need to shorten the last pair of mounts near the rear of the roof to the same height or slightly higher, than the other 4 mounts. It also occurred to me today that the roof rack needs to be really solid since our yurt stacks 2 feet high compared to the standard 1 foot high. The wind resistance will be about double. I have an idea on how to make the front end of the yurt more aerodynamic using just the front bumper straps, some rope and a piece of canvas. It will form a triangle in front of the yurt to help clean up the air flow a bit. The 4 inch tall space between the yurt and the roof will allow storage of a good size shade structure.

The Plymouth wagon is being retired from service after serving the world for 40 years and for serving me for 15 years. It’s replacement is a 1992 Honda Accord Wagon that I just picked up. I’m going through it now making repairs. It runs fine after installing an engine computer. The previous owners put $2k in repairs into it. So when I’m done it will be a great ride for years to come. I’ll get pics of it up at some point.