Cargo Solutions Versions 1 & 2

Moby is a CrewMax Tundra. The cab is great for allowing me, the wife and the two kids lots of room to stretch out and relax when driving distances. Unfortunately all this cab space comes at the expense of bed space. At almost 67" square, there is not a lot of room to begin with in the bed. Throw in a tool chest that is around 20" deep, and bed space starts disappearing rapidly.

 Having previously installed the Yakima crossbars to Moby's roof, it seemed the simple solution would be to go with a basket on top. So the search began for a suitable gear basket.
We have a 2005 Pathfinder that can be seen elsewhere in this blog. On the top of the Pathfinder we have outfitted a Yakima Load Warrior basket with the extension. This has been a good product. My friend Chris had a Yakima Mega Warrior basket with the extension also that he was willing to sell. We exchanged money and basket and mounted the basket.

I ran this setup for a few months but, I did not like the inaccessible location of the basket way up on the roof. It worked fine for storage of camping gear, and left the bed open for other items like bikes and such

but getting all the items up and down required a display of gymnastics and balance beam acts on the bed rails and various other parts of Moby that made me feel like I was pushing my luck a little too much. It became obvious after the trip pictured above that this setup would not last.

Now this moment caused a  major rethink for me. I had always planned on doing something similar to the Expedition One's Tundra that has a bed rack not quite in line with the roof and mounting a basket or possibly a roof top tent on top. My experience with the basket over the cab showed that items placed that high would not really be feasible for most of the camping situations I encounter. I decided that placement almost directly above the bed rails would really work best in my situation.
To facilitate this, I purchased some Yakima bases, towers and crossbars to mount to the bed.

With the help of my son Quinn, we took the extension out of the Mega Warrior basket. The basket measured 74" long with the extension and hung way over the tailgate.

We mounted the towers and crossbars to the bed of the truck using stainless steel hardware and mounted the basket on to the crossbars. We managed to finish this up right before our World of Webelos campout in Sealy, Texas. We got everything loaded up and I have to say, this is the best setup in the world (for me). You can load the basket, cover it with a tarp, and strap everything down easily. Once the basket is loaded you've got the bed left for the heavier bigger items. You can just see in some of the pics, but mounted outboard of the basket on the crossbars are two bike carriers. I mounted these because the basket sits too low to allow bed placement of bicycles.  Contact me if any questions, be happy to get more specific if requested. Thanks.