After a couple years of use the Jeep Compass has been a fairly good vehicle. A decent daily driver, good gas mileage where gas is $5 a gallon, and able to do rough back roads with little worry.
I do have a few complaints, one of which had to be dealt with this week… The cargo area bed supports simply failed. I had noted signs of stressed plastic before, some cracks appearing after hauling heavy loads.
The final straw was Deep Violet, my 18″ telescope… Weighing in at well over 100lbs. When unloading the ‘scope after a night at Kaʻohe I found that the bed seems to have collapsed under the weight. The molded plastic bed supports simply ripped away from the cargo bed side panels.
An SUV where the cargo bed supports are two protrusions molded into the thin plastic side panels? Yeah, not impressed.
Sure, my telescope is heavy, but not as heavy as some loads that could be hauled by this vehicle. The telescope is well under the 400lbs that this cargo bed is supposedly rated to. Frankly, looking at the molded supports I cannot see how a 400lb load rating can be justified. Keep in mind even a small bump can bounce the load up and down, multiplying the effective mass.
Well? I need to fix this. I am not replacing the entire cargo area sidewall with the same molded supports that will just fail again. Of course, you can see where this is going… Warm up the 3D printer!
A little investigation shows that the wheel well structure is just 20mm underneath the failed supports. I design up a bit of plastic that will bolt onto the steel and provide a vastly better solution. Why didn’t Jeep do this in the first place?
The only nusiance is that installing these new bed supports one has to remove the rear wheel and wheel well liner in order to put nuts on the other end of the bolts. Once that is done installation is straightforward, drill through the wheel well and bolt the new supports into place.
A couple little bits of 3D printed trim to cover over the ripped open plastic sidewall and the job is done. Solid supports that will hold the load. My plastic design is not going to fail, not with three 1/4″-20 bolts reinforcing the plastic.
Good thing I got it done… need to load the telescope tomorrow!
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