So we’ve been off the water for a bit with extended family bouts of flu, cold and a house move.With the move to the house, we found ourselves with less storage and really needed some additional floor space so it was time to work out something for a SUP rack.
I’d been looking at a variety of options and found some that I thought about buying.
SUP Racks for Purchase
I particularly liked the Expandable Ceiling Surfboard & SUP Rack from http://storeyourboard.com but it was quite pricey and at this point I couldn’t have waited anyway.
I will say that I am a bit bummed that you cannot get the base rack with a SUP attachment on the base rack instead of a surfboard one. I’m storing our SUPs in our garage so maximum clearance is what I’m looking for. With this rack, the base rack only comes with a surfboard mount (26″ wide instead of 33″). They say lots of people use that to store paddles which would be cool but I’d rather have the additional 8″ or so in clearance. So if you’re like me, you’d still need the 2 SUP upgrade and be looking at $250 or so.
We also thought about the SUP Wall Rack as it’d be cool to have the boards on display but we don’t have the wall space. It’s also quite a bit cheaper.
Building a SUP Rack
So with those 2 options not being perfect, I figured I’d replicate something I found on Stand Up Zone. I used DavidJohn‘s roller SUP racks as a model. With those in mind, my buddy, Nathan, and I hit Home Depot and freestyled a bit.
I’ll put together a more detailed post on the components and the actual building of the racks but here they are.
If you are thinking about figuring out your own custom solution, there are also a bunch more posts on the How Do You Store Your SUPs thread on Stand Up Zone.
SUP Rack v2
So I’m pretty happy with the rack at this point but I still need to get it closer to the ceiling to provide more clearance. I actually used the hooks that were already in the garage ceiling (made for bikes) so switching those out or smaller eye bolts would help. What I’m going to do though is split up the ceiling connections into 4 (1 at each corner of each rack) rather than have just the 2 connection points. Pushing the SUPs on to the rack caused them to move a bit back and forth as well as sway and twist horizontally. I’m fine with the back and forth movement but don’t think I want to deal with the horizontal twisting ongoing.
I’m also going to attach 4 pulleys at those connection points and then route the rope back to a common point where I’ll put additional pulleys and then bring them down the wall to 1 of 2 attachment points. I want to be able to bring the boards up and down easily so it makes for easy loading and then also stores at maximum height for the greatest amount of clearance.
The poles and rollers should serve fine though and will function the same in v2.
I will definitely post more (and final build) details as we get this completed!
