In this thread, I'll cover how a rear carrier is built from white pine lumber milled from our land up in NH. When bouncing around with the ATV, carrying tools and supplies, I have grown tired of the 5 gallon bucket that I have strapped to the back of the machine and wanted a larger cargo capacity without modifying the stock carrier deck. I’ve seen a number of carriers built by others online, and while I’m sure they are very functional, they are square boxes with sharp corners. I wanted something that follows the contours of the rear carrier deck, and is easy to install and remove from the machine, and is neat looking.
I have a small manual Woodland mills HM-126 saw mill, so there's a lot of dry wood sitting all over the place, and hefty pieces to choose from. I have some 16” wide 1” thick planks, and some 11” planks, a full 2” thick. The 1” wood is good for the bottom, the 2” material can be resawed to form the contoured perimeter of the carrier. My 18” band saw is capable of 9 ½”+ depth of cut to resaw, so that’s how deep the carrier will be. Before we had kids, I used to build RC airplanes from balsa, so gluing together irregular wood pieces and then contouring them is a pretty familiar thing to me. For most of the assembly, 30 minute epoxy will be used. The 30 minutes gives ample time to get everything arranged and held together securely before it sets up.
Here’s the base with the first contoured piece resawed from 2” white pine stock. The 2” material is good in that it provides a reasonable area to rest on the bandsaw table and stay vertical. But before resawing, each piece was run across the jointer to make sure that the side was perfectly square, and the bandsaw table fine-tuned so it’s also perfectly square.
I have a small manual Woodland mills HM-126 saw mill, so there's a lot of dry wood sitting all over the place, and hefty pieces to choose from. I have some 16” wide 1” thick planks, and some 11” planks, a full 2” thick. The 1” wood is good for the bottom, the 2” material can be resawed to form the contoured perimeter of the carrier. My 18” band saw is capable of 9 ½”+ depth of cut to resaw, so that’s how deep the carrier will be. Before we had kids, I used to build RC airplanes from balsa, so gluing together irregular wood pieces and then contouring them is a pretty familiar thing to me. For most of the assembly, 30 minute epoxy will be used. The 30 minutes gives ample time to get everything arranged and held together securely before it sets up.
Here’s the base with the first contoured piece resawed from 2” white pine stock. The 2” material is good in that it provides a reasonable area to rest on the bandsaw table and stay vertical. But before resawing, each piece was run across the jointer to make sure that the side was perfectly square, and the bandsaw table fine-tuned so it’s also perfectly square.
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