My Power Wagon is 18' 9" end to end with a shortbed 6' box, and I needed to get a bunch of 16' baseboards home for our renovation project downstairs. For those of you who've installed baseboard, you know that the cheapy stuff is compressed fiberboard which can break / snap pretty easily. While the baseboard we bought was made of higher grade stuff, at 16' long they were still succeptible to snapping without proper support.

Instead of going out and buying a real contractor rack to mount in the stake pockets on the bed, I decided to stick with my usual M.O. of being a cheap bastard and build one out of wood. You might laugh, but it worked surprisingly well.

The build is pretty simple and I already had the stuff in the garage to build it. If you had to buy the materials, I'm guessing it'd run about $10-$15. I forgot the wood dimensions, but the width was almost the exact same as the stake pocket, and I used a bandsaw to trim the short side so that it would slide down into the pocket and rest on the brace inside. I then measured the top of the bed rail behind the cab to the top of the cab so I knew how high to mount the horizontal piece of wood between the two stake pockets. I also screwed a couple of screws into the wood to hook short bungies to just to be on the safe side, but I didn't really need them as they were a tight fit in the stake pockets.

I got some odd looks on the way to Home Depot because without anything on it, it looks like a really dumb spoiler! I didn't go so far as to build one for the front stake pockets, but I figured I'd lay down a blanket on top of the cab to prevent any scratches. I also bungied the baseboards to the UbiquiRack to make sure they didn't move around on top of the cab.

Click on a picture for a larger, higher resolution view.



It worked great
Another angle

Looks like a spoiler
Another angle

You can see the bungies here
Another angle

Another angle
Another angle

Got comments or suggestions?