Building the Nomad

Rounding out the illumination modifications on the Nomad is a pair of three-inch, 12W LED work lamps mounted on the rear Surco roof rack stanchions. Although the interior cargo lamp has been converted to LED, I needed more light on the food prep area along with a bit more illumination rearward, though the LED reverse light upgrade puts out great coverage.  The work lamps are wired from the control panel I built into the platform.  I pulled a hot lead with a ground from the Blue Sea Blade fuse block to the rear of the platform and wired the circuit through the voltmeter, to the 12V marine socket, to the USB, to the switch and terminated at the lamps. Twelve watts is just right, not overpowering, spotting the work area and the storage drawer and when we're not cooking we can bounce them off the awning for a soft indirect light.

With the roof rack finally where I want it to be, I pulled the trigger on new off-road combo lamps on the bull bar, and finally wired up the trail lights on the roof rack.  It all begins with the addition of a Blue Sea Blade Fuse block and a 100 amp breaker.  Blue Sea Systems make a variety of marine and automotive application 12v fuse blocks. The ST Blade box comes in 6 and 12 circuits with or without a negative bus. I won't be adding many accessories so I opted for the six circuit ST Blade with the negative bus to make grounding something I won't have to troubleshoot.  Both the fuse block and the breaker are mounted atop the fuse box cover and the relays are mounted on the driver side fender wall.  The Blue Sea circuit is wired with a jumper from the positive terminal of the battery to the breaker and then a second jumper to the positive terminal of the fuse block. The block is grounded to the rig. Two circuit relays are grounded at the same spot with positive lead

You might recall the roof rack hack on the Apex cargo basket where I cut some length out of the risers to lower the rack and hopefully reduce drag. The mod worked well and supported our recovery and camp gear without issue. But I wasn't ever pleased that the rack wasn't full length, leaving the last eighteen inches of the side awning unsupported and putting the off-road lights too far back on the roof just ahead of the sunroof opening, losing the bottom half of their beams and creating a lot of noise. To remedy these issues I picked up another Apex rack to modify to fit in the space left by the existing rack after it's repositioned at the front of the Nomad's roofline. With the original rack in place forward on the roof, I measured the distance from the end of the rack to the end of the roofline and came up with 29.5" of length. That meant cutting the new rack down from 62.5 inches. The rack ships in four pieces that, two halves of the bott