Out of all of the trips and adventure we have done the 4Runner has been 99.9% trouble free. That 0.1% was the fuel gauge. Every once and while and usually only with a trailer after hitting a massive bump the fuel gauge has stuck. It’s never stayed stuck long enough for me to figure out just what happened, but it has left us on the side of the road waiting on AAA before. A proper way to carry extra fuel was something that I have wanted for a long time.
I ordered a pair of Rotopax 2 gallon cans and got to fitting them to the roof. I played around with fitting them to the factory cross bars, but it wasn’t happening. I set out to find some metal, but it was a bit tough to find what I needed on a Saturday in “Silicon Valley”. I finally found a welding supply store that decided that keeping raw metal outside in the rainy season.
Because of the curvature of the roof, a straight bar wouldn’t connect to the existing roof rails. Part of the reason why I still have the stock roof rack is me being too cheap to build a full rack. Part of it through is keeping a low profile to help a little bit with fuel mileage. Rather than lift the cans up in the air I used a combination of band saw and angle grinder to scallop the square tube until it cleared the roof.
With the two scalloped cross bars done I added a bit more square tube and some 4″ cross bars to finish off the rack. I didn’t have time to get the fancy Rotopax mounts so I used some 1″ round stock to build my own.
The properly spaced 1″ round screws to the cross bars from the bottom and hold the can in place perfectly.
Then a held in place from the top by a couple of disks I made on the lathe. While I was on the lathe I made four aluminum inserts that fit inside the tubes to keep them from crushing when you tighten these down to the factory rails.
Once again it was finished off with the Duplicolor bed liner.
