Compact Camping Concepts’s No Weld Trailer Rack Brackets now allow folks with basic DIY skills and tools to build sturdy, long-lasting trailer racks. The brackets help you to make solid corner connections with no welding required.
Purchase a bracket set and source your 1.5” square tubing locally to keep cost down.
Purchase a bracket set with precut 1.5” square tubing sections.
Purchase a complete rack ready for painting and bolting together.
To build a trailer rack: what you are basically doing is creating two hoops and connecting them together. The hoops can be side-to-side in the front and rear, or front-to-back on each side. You connect the hoops together to increase the overall rigidity of your rack.
The primary bracket of the rack system is the corner bracket. With corner brackets, there are two types of joints.
Where a tubing section intersects another.
For applications where the racks will attach to a flat deck or pad, we have a base bracket. Rack uprights can also be bolted directly to the side of frames and trailer boxes.
Begin by determining the shape and size of your rack. I do this by sketching planned rack. Then use the sketch to figure out the number of bracket needed and tube lengths.
Once you have received your brackets, the first step is cutting your piece to size. This could be done with a hack saw, but that would take some time. A better way to cut your tubing is using a 4.5” angle grinder with a cutoff wheel attached.
After you have your tubing cut to length, lay the piece out on the floor the way they go together.
Then going one section at a time, position the brackets at the joint positions, square the joints up and mark the bracket holes.
Then painting can be as simple as a quick scuff up with 220 sandpaper, a wipe down with something like xlyene to clean and a coat or two of enamel rattle can paint.
Finally, assemble everything with 5/16” x 2 1/4″ bolt, load up whatever you plan to load on your rack and get out for some fun.