Roof Racks

DanTheVanMan:
I'm brand new at the restoration game (and this website!). I'm currently looking for a roof rack like the one pictured on your G10 in the "Coca Cola" smugmug gallery, and some other odds and ends. Any advice/leads greatly appreciated!
Thanks also for your amazing pictures, now I know what my Little Sister should look like.

First Chroma66 I'd like to say welcome.
Always glad to here we have new members wanting to save another early van. The rack I have came off an mid 70's to early 80's Chevy van. They used the same rack in the late 60's but were very rare at the time. I had to do a lot of research to find the "Period correct rack. If you look at this pic you will see it is a one piece, one inch aluminum tube with plastic or rubber end caps. And notice the square block risers? The two rear ones are strait and the four sides slant to the rear. You find this, you know you have the correct ones. I got this one when I was still living just south of Atlanta and there were several 70's-mid 80's vans with these racks so if you have a large Junk Yard near you, you should be able to find one.

Hope this helps,
Dan

hey danthevanman on your roof rac, do you think there could be
a way that a guy could make one out of round aluminum tubing
and make some stands out of aluminum square tubing, ya know
using an electrical conduit tubing bender, somehow just doesn`t
sound that tough.

I think the tubing would be very simple if you have access to a bender but you would have to be very creative to make stand-off's that looked nice but it could be done. Of course I only paid $30 for mine at the JY......

great buy, but not always an easy find, just thinking about a way to
help out a vanner

RD, I found several at the JY when I got mine. Seems like they are not hard to find.....

Thank you so much for this info!
I was stumped - I wanted extra cargo storage but didn't want to ruin the lines of the van with an ugly rack.
Coming along slowly but surely...I'll post some fotos of the gnarly rust holes that I fixed with Miracle Paint and fiberglass sheeting.
Next, I'm going to reinforce the ceiling so we can walk on the roof w/o damaging it. When I got my van, the poor roof looked like it had a perm, so I used the bottle jack and a 2 x 4 to straighten it.j
Not to be a sales rep for J C W but maybe I can give back a little with this info: http://www.jcwhitney.com/vantred-anti-skid-textured-floor-protection/p2030956.jcwx?filterid=i13j2&_requestid=803086

and

http://www.jcwhitney.com/vanrug-feels-like-carpet-floor-protection/p2030955.jcwx?filterid=i13j2&_requestid=804997

respectively.

OF COURSE these came out right after I bought mine. Thanks again for the excellent advice and I'll be posting more pics soon!

No sense on running two threads on the same topic simultaneously so I'm locking this one and we all can continue it here:

https://vintage-vans.forumotion.com/t20762-got-a-roof-rackanyone-else-sport-a-rack