Our friend Joanie got a new van, so I took this as an excuse to play around with 3D software a bit to design the shelves for the interior. Here is what we came up with after a number of discussions:
Nowadays, Joanie wings most of the time, so the rack has been designed primarily for that. But on occasion, she may want to take a couple of surf and windsurf boards on a trip, so we added shelves for those, too. With 2 boards on the top, the shelf could hold 5 boards, with plenty of empty space in the van.
The wing board will be the board shell handle the most, so the bottom rack is designed to make that easy. The idea is to slide the board onto a big piece of wood, which may be painted or covered with plastic to allow for wet boards. In front will be 2 fixed "bumpers" - think of yoga blocks - that keep the board in place. In the back, there are a couple more yoga blocks to keep the board from moving around. To take the board out, she'll just remove the block in the back, and then slide the board out. On the sides, there are a couple of boards that keep the board from sliding out to the side. They'll be covered with yoga mat pieces or similar. For longer trips, the board has holes in the front and back so that the board can be strapped down.
Above is another solid wood board that makes a shelf for the wings. If there are no windsurf boards in the van, that shelf should easily hold all of Joanie's wings (and she has quite a few!). But there's also space on the ground, below the shelves.
One concern was that stuff might fly around and become dangerous in an accident, so we paid special attention to fix the rack in place. The support studs on the left side will each be mounted with two connectors to the L tracks on the side of the van. The right supports will be fixed at the bottom to a piece of wood or aluminum that is attached to the L tracks at the bottom. The front support on the right will also be attached at the roof. Boards will be strapped to the top shelves. All connectors and screws will be stainless steel. The individual L track connectors are rated to 1833 lb, so the setup should survive collisions without releasing the attached gear.
I created the model in Blender. Most measurements should be reasonably accurate, except that the thickness of the support studs etc. may vary, depending on what is available. Additional images are below. The large boxes in the images are 1 foot tall, the small boxes 1 inch. The original Blender file is available here.
If you want to look at the model interactively with your browser, you can download the design file in .dae format, and use an online 3D viewer like the one at 3dviewer.net/. A tip for 3dviewer.net: after opening the downloaded .dae file using drag & drop, select the hierarchical view on the left, and hide the "Van sides" by clicking on the eye - it should look like this:
Here are views from the different sides (screen shots from Blender). View from the back (click on images for a larger view):
From the side:
From the top:
From the top, with the middle shelf removed:
3D view from the back right:
The little grey cylinders indicate where the supports are attached to the L tracks on the side of the van. Those may not be cylinders, but rather pieces of wood or something else in the right size to bridge the distance to the side of the van (which is about 7 inches wider in the middle than at the top). For screwing the connectors into the L tracks, Joanie ordered US Cargo Control L Track Double Lug Threaded Stud Fittings from Amazon.
Building the rack would be a lot of fun, but it would take me forever, and I'm supposed to work (at least on the non-windy days :-). So I'll have to leave that to someone else - but learning to use Blender while developing the design was a lot of fun.
