tkn
21st February 2011, 02:08 PM
When I bought my GQ cab chassis, the owner said “If you lose anything in the cab, look under the driver’s seat.”
He was absolutely right. But there is only a limited number of times you will put up with diving under the driver’s seat to find the mobile phone, spare keys, LED torch, spare change and all the other bits of stuff essential to life.
My solution is a simple tray fitted like a console under the roof of the cab. Its been there for about 6 months and still does the job, so I guess the idea was about right.
The tray itself is made from 1.2mm plain aluminium sheet with 1.6mm aluminium “U” channels to stiffen it.
In one of the pics you will see that the sheet has been bent upward to match the rear slope of the cab roof – the other end is flat and although it can’t be seen there is a large “U” formed from 3mm sheet to support that end.
To fit the tray, the roof light is removed and the rear vision mirror bracket is removed. Then the sloped part of the tray is attached to the roof using the existing light bracket and the large “U” is screwed to the roof using the existing rear vision mount.
There are no new holes in the vehicle and you can use the rear vision bracket and light base as templates to get the hole spacings right.
There was enough free length of cable to allow the light to be mounted to the bottom of the tray (see pics). I replaced the rear vision mirror with the screen for a rear camera, but the rear view mirror mount could be refitted.
You’ll probably see that the end of the sun visor in the pics has been pruned – they got in the way of the camera screen and cutting them gave more width for that end of the tray.
The topside of the tray is lined with some fabric and that combined with the 1.6mm aluminium “U” channels (about 20mm deep) means that all the bits I put up there stay there and don’t move around all that much.
He was absolutely right. But there is only a limited number of times you will put up with diving under the driver’s seat to find the mobile phone, spare keys, LED torch, spare change and all the other bits of stuff essential to life.
My solution is a simple tray fitted like a console under the roof of the cab. Its been there for about 6 months and still does the job, so I guess the idea was about right.
The tray itself is made from 1.2mm plain aluminium sheet with 1.6mm aluminium “U” channels to stiffen it.
In one of the pics you will see that the sheet has been bent upward to match the rear slope of the cab roof – the other end is flat and although it can’t be seen there is a large “U” formed from 3mm sheet to support that end.
To fit the tray, the roof light is removed and the rear vision mirror bracket is removed. Then the sloped part of the tray is attached to the roof using the existing light bracket and the large “U” is screwed to the roof using the existing rear vision mount.
There are no new holes in the vehicle and you can use the rear vision bracket and light base as templates to get the hole spacings right.
There was enough free length of cable to allow the light to be mounted to the bottom of the tray (see pics). I replaced the rear vision mirror with the screen for a rear camera, but the rear view mirror mount could be refitted.
You’ll probably see that the end of the sun visor in the pics has been pruned – they got in the way of the camera screen and cutting them gave more width for that end of the tray.
The topside of the tray is lined with some fabric and that combined with the 1.6mm aluminium “U” channels (about 20mm deep) means that all the bits I put up there stay there and don’t move around all that much.