DIY roof rack for 5th gen 4Runner ...

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My best friend and I both have a 5th gen 4Runner (mine the Limited has a sunroof, his SR5 does not) and we wanted a roof rack to aid carrying stuff while camping. We feel the Gobi is the best rack out there, but pricey, and since I can weld, I figured we could do/built our own. I found this DIY article, and decided to create a sort-of-hybrid design with ideas from the article, things we liked about the Gobi, and a couple of 4Runner DIY articles from other folks that have also done a DIY roof rack.I modified the design from the DIY in several ways by adding extra cross supports, using 14g steel, making the outer frame fully-enclosed/sealed, making the rack full length, including designing a wind deflector, adding side mounting points (1/4" thick), wider load-bearing mount surfaces (more on this later), etc. I was not in a particular hurry so I actually Tig welded everything on both racks:

Although my garage floor is far from flat, we used it as a starting point to get the outer frame:

Another design change is that we made the inner struts sit exactly one inch from the top of the frame, which gives a 1" lip to prevent items from potentially sliding over, but also means that longer pieces can fit flat against the outer edges of the frame. I literally used hockey pucks to get the 1" spacing:


I used my "old" circa-2003 HTP water-cooled Tig welder for everything. Not as modern and lacking options from the more recent HTP 221 model, but it still works well. This is my second HTP welder (my other one is the 2100 MIG welder) and I am super impressed with HTP:

Last edited by wquiles; 11 Hours Ago at 04:31 PM.
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Several roof racks are installed with all of the load/weight placed on spacers, then bolted to the roof, which is not the way the factory roof rack (nor Gobi) does to spread the load to a larger bearing surface. Here is the wide area used by the factory Toyota mounts:

So I designed a two-part system to spread the load. First, I designed a wider mounting plate with welded spacers as a single unit, which will be bolted to the rack, and 2, a wider mounting plate on the rack which spreads the load over the factory/OEM rubber pads, like in this preliminary picture:

Here you can see me using a fixture I created (since I am doing 8x of these - 4x mount points times two racks, one for my friend and mine):

Once I had all pieces welded/drilled/prepped, we mounted the welded roof rack on the roof so that I can align the mounts/holes to the rack at the 4x factory mount points (we will be adding the two front mount points like Gobi does later on).Last edited by wquiles; 11 Hours Ago at 04:19 PM.
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I then designed and fabricated custom mounts for the LED light bar:

Last edited by wquiles; 11 Hours Ago at 04:21 PM.
Reply:The Gobi rack (our target goal) has a static rating of 700-800 pounds, so my family helped me to at least test my design with a little over 500 pounds:

My welding mentor tells me the rack should handle "way more!", so I will call it good enough.We then proceeded to design a way to hold the 1/8" thick Lexan for the air deflector. My friend came up with a clever arrangement. In fact, he constantly came up with great ideas to streamline the build/assembly as well!

The rack and the 6x mounting feet (4x bolted to the OEM locations) are going to be fully painted/protected, but the spacers in the roof need protection as well, so I used temp-cured Molyresin for those.  For priming the rack I used Raptor Acid Etch Primer for the "easy to reach" spots, and Rust-oleum high performance metal primer (oil-based, applied with a foam brush) to reach into the nooks and crannies, specially inside the lips of the strut pieces.Once I covered all the tough places with Rust-oleum, I then spray painted the frame with the primer.  I then used the Raptor coating to give it one coat on the bottom and two coats on top (where it will see wear):


After 3x days of curing indoors, I then proceeded to use butyl tape to seal the roof openings (same OEM style material Toyota uses), layer the rubber spacers, the steel spacer, and then I was ready to bolt the roof rack for good.Last edited by wquiles; 11 Hours Ago at 04:30 PM.
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We used a "door rubber seal" at the edge of the Lexan to prevent scratching the paint and provide a good seal against the wind. This photo also shows how Gobi and other similar racks use front "feet" on top of the OEM rubber molding to provide additional load-carrying capacity:

And here with the LED light bar in place:

Mine is "mostly" open up front for the sun roof:

Some additional thoughts:1) The cost for each of us was about $350 for parts, and another $200 for paint/prime for me using the Raptor truck bed lining kit (my friend went the powder coat route at $240), so about $550, vs $1300 (approx) for the Gobi, so roughly 1/2 of the cost and I would argue just as strong.2) However this project was a LOT of work, trying stuff out, designing new stuff, lots and lots of welding (two racks!), doing a little bit over the weekends, from Sept 18 2021 through Dec 28 2021. For me, since I got to spend a lot of quality time with my best friend, and shared a lot of the work/labor, and we together came up with solutions to how/where make things work, the time spent was totally worth it.My advice, unless you have the time and patience and can figure out the little details, buy the Gobi. They did the design, they figured it all out for you - just bolt in place.WillLast edited by wquiles; 11 Hours Ago at 04:27 PM.
Reply:That turned out nice


Reply:Nice.  I suspect your rack capacity is way up there, if you are talking about uniformed load. What does the manufacture say the roof / supports will carry?