In my seemingly never ending quest to organize the everloving shit out of the 4Runner for our cross country camping trip, I keep looking for ways to take clutter out of the back of the truck and put it elsewhere.  My rifle box on top of the roof successfully holds all our emergency stuff, tools, and recovery gear.  I set my sights on our folding camping chairs and table.  All of that stuff is super bulky and I really don’t want to just throw it on the floor in the back of the 4Runner.  They make all kinds of rooftop cargo bags, but they’re either too small or way too big.  So, as usual, time for a DIY.

I already had a huge scrap of heavy duty vinyl coated polyester leftover from our camper build and I’m going to use a thick piece of sail material leftover from the sailboat for the underside for abrasion resistance.  The only thing I had to buy was a long enough zipper and some orange webbing because I like bling.

The first task was to start cutting! (I’m not really one to plan, apparently)

I added 3 tie down points on each side. That should be enough to keep it sturdy and keep it from flapping around.  The size should be enough for our chairs and table easily with maybe a little room to spare just in case. Maybe the tent will fit in there also!

I didn’t quite have enough black fabric to do the entire bag in black, so I improvised and did half of the zipper portion in orange!

The top half is done now.  All I need to do is sew on the floor!

Sewing the floor on (and all 4 layers of sunbrella and sail material…) was a quick task with my Sailrite sewing machine.  All I had to do was flip the thing inside out so the seams were inside and we were done! On the plus side I only have a little bit of material left over.  That will give me less random shit to have to store on the boat! LOL

Time for a test fit on the truck! The size is pretty much perfect, even if I didn’t bother to check the truck to make sure I had room for the bag before I started.  I stuffed some random crap in the bag, so it’s kind of lumpy, but you get the idea!

I like it! I’m going to have it tied down in a much more organized manner.  We even test fit the fuel cans on the back of the truck in preparation for our road trip! There are definitely some places in Nevada we could have used an extra 10 gallons of fuel and now that the hurricane smashed through Louisiana we might load them up until we get into Texas.

I’m effectively out of roof space now, so I’ll have to get creative with interior organization again!