My jankiest of janky light bars is finished. It's constructed entirely of scrap metal that I had lying around. The main tube is a section of an upright post from a wheeled TV stand that I no longer needed. The rest is 1/8 in plate steel cut, bent, welded, drilled, and bolted together. Ground rules were: 1. that it needed to be easily removable. The lights aren’t cosmetic. I’ll only use them on off road trips. The V70 XC is parked outside and sits most of the time, and I didn’t want to leave the lights exposed to the elements for no reason. And, I didn’t want extra drag on road trips when they weren’t needed. 2. No holes could be drilled in the body. I don’t want to invite leaks into the interior. And 3. It had to fit under my ski box in case I needed the extra cargo space up top on an off road excursion.
So, I ended up mounting it to the forward roof bar brackets. The “ears” that the bar mounts to are semi-permanent, and I had to butcher the roof rail trim pieces. Not a completely clean installation, but it was the solution I came up with. The requirement for the main LED bar to sit under the nose of the ski box meant I couldn’t just mount it across the roof rails. It needed to be low under the ski box which meant it also needed to be forward of the sunroof to avoid clashing with the sunroof when the rear was tilted up. Maybe I could have come up with a clamp and longer-reaching bracket to be able to clamp to the roof rail to give a completely removable mount. I might think about that for V2.0… The wiring runs along the roof rail to the back and through the hatch opening where it plugs into a panel-mount connector in the upper corner of the interior trim panel. The hatch weather strip closes cleanly over the wires. I didn’t see a big deal with running the wires through the hatch seal for short term trips. Maybe there could be some water leakage if it rains. I’ll just zip tie the wires to the roof rail for the duration of any trips. And finally, the power switch is mounted cleanly in the climate control unit with power routed through an auxiliary fuse box and relay in the spare tire well.
The center LED bar is a 22 in Nilight spot/flood unit. The small side lights are Nilight 4 in flood lights.
Brett
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