Building the Nomad

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...

With the platform insert there aren't many ways to stow flat rigid items and yet there are two that are indispensable to our travels, a folding step and a folding table. The step is used around the rig when packing the roof rack and it gives my dog a literal leg up in hopping into the back. The table is an 18X20" GCI compact camp table that's just right for dining for two of us or to get gear off the tent floor. With the previous mod of the utility shelf eliminated it opened some real estate on the rear door where these items could be stowed. It all works around the Camillus hatchet/door handle well and the placement still kept a window to access the interior door lever. Quick Fists are the greatest kit out there for this kind of arrangement.