I finally broke down and bought the nice molle panel for the passenger side window so I could mount all of my water system stuff to it.  My original plan was to use that panel to also hold our portable battery instead of just setting it on top of the cooler and having it fall off.  However, there’s just not quite enough room and I don’t really like the idea of having something so heavy just strapped to a vertical plate like that.

So I came up with a solution.  A few companies make a shelf that runs between their window panels on both sides.  People stack camping crap etc up there.  My problem is that I don’t want to pay another $150 for the window panel and then another $350 for the shelf.  So, as usual, I’m going to DIY something.

I decided I was going to run something between the 2 “coat hook” attachment points in the overhead of the truck.  This meant I needed some sort of 45* bracket.  I had planned on going to Home Depot and getting some sort of patio wood bracket, until I was cleaning the boat and came across a set of brackets originally used to hold the single side band radio.  They’re 90 degree, but the middle section is angled at 45 just like I needed! Score! After drilling some holes, I got them mounted in the back of the truck pretty easily!

Since we still have large chunks of marine plywood that we got for the boat I hacked off an 8″ wide chunk of that and painted it black to go between the brackets.  It mounted easily with some washers and screws from beneath.

Excuse the mess in the back of the truck! LOL  The shelf is really low profile with only an inch or two above it.  Just enough room to run straps through to tie things down.  I didn’t really get to play with it much today since I finished it while dripping sweat in the back of the truck right before lunch.  I want to tie our small camp chairs to it so we always have them available and I want to make a mounting situation for our portable battery bank.  Ideally it will be suspended from the shelf somehow and then sit on some metal brackets mounted to the window panel. I haven’t gotten that far yet!

Update: The 2 small camp chairs fit perfectly side by side under the shelf.  I used 2 nice straps that Jason had for bikepacking (mine now! HA!).  They don’t even block the view out the back. Excellent.

Jason and I are almost all packed up for our road trip!

Look at all that fancy built in storage!