Looking for simple low cost way to stack two rec kayaks on the garage floor

As the title says, trying to make something cheap and simple to save a little floor space. My kayaks live in the garage in the summer and I don’t have ceiling or wall space for them.

1" PVC … minimum 3 12’ sticks plus 8 Tee fittings. Better might be 16 Tee fittings and maybe 4 or 5 12’ sticks. skip the glue and, if needed, use some sheetmetal screws to hold it together.

Do you want it portable or not, storing flat or on edge?

Great questions! I was initially thinking no need for portability but it might be a nice to have addition. Not biased to flat or on edge. My baseline idea is two wooden sawhorses with a split noodle over the top edge. The lower boat could be on a kayak cart and tuck underneath.

Would you like some sugestions?

I saw a pic of two kayaks stacked only by two pool noodle sections…must have right shapes for it to be stable.

Yes, looking for ideas, that was the purpose of the post.

I have seen some sot’s that “nest” into each other and can stack quite high. I have a sit in and a sit on but I will try to see if they stack together or not.

kayak length and ceiling height?

See you on the water,
Marshall Seddon
The River Connection, Inc.
9 W. Market St.
Hyde Park, NY. 12538
845-229-0595 main
845-242-4731 mobile
Main: www.the-river-connection.com
Store: www.the-river-connection.us
Email: marshall@the-river-connection.com
Social: linker.ee/rivercxn

If you want to stack them using saddles available on the market or homemade saddles made out of big Pool Noodles ( you can get them pretty big, like 6” in diameter) and you want them to be stationary, that is all you need. If you want the whole thing to be mobile make a simple dolly out of 2X4s on a flat with the end cross pieces on the bottom , the length determined by being just beyond the saddles and the width determined by the saddles nestling into it, then screw on four casters on the ends of the bottom cross pieces.

PVC or lumber. Build a rack.

2 Likes

not necessarily low cost…

I had height issues in that I needed (where the kayaks lived) the ability to bit under the opened garage door and the other boats hanging from the rafters. So it was either build something or buy something.

Lumber at the time was EXPENSIVE! it still may be, and PVC wasnt going to be strong enough to fit as many boats as I could and needed to so I bought this:

At the time Crap from China was cheap.

I have in it my Tsunami 145, my Aspire 100, the Dagger, KAOS and the Tempest 180.
There is a taller version but it wouldn’t fit, Perhaps if I had less boats… NAH.

I like it as it rolls easily allowing me to get at gear and whatnot on the wall mounted shelves.

I still have 3 Kayaks and a canoe hanging from the rafters and One on the floor in a Kayak hanger (and still one hanging from the wall.

so fro me it was the best solution I could come up with at the time and had I built it out of wood to have the same capabilities would have run me pretty much the same cost wise. Though now Things may have changed, haven’t checked home-depot lately.

You can see it in use:

That is not bad for $189, you could not build one for that that nice.

Edit: Now tell them about the Compression Gloves…

Nah the gloves already been poo-poo’ed by the boutique boaters. As they will do regarding this rack since none are name brand and neither cost an arm and a leg, so obviously they cannot be any good. :slight_smile:

but then again I think I only paid $169, and had enough amazon points to get it for $120. or so.

Me not having more money than sense, I need to do everything on a shoe-string budget and do the best I can. And training the engine is well free…

Somebody already put down the Compression Gloves? Some people cease to persist.

I never was big on Amazon, but after learning how to use it, taking advantage of the points, buying previously bought items at discount, shopping for dicounts and good values, you can really make some good deals.

Edit: The Boutique Boaters can talk a good game, but can the paddle with @Craig_S ?

I’ve stored kayaks on my garage floors resting on a pair of scrap car tires centered under the bulkheads.

I spotted this method shown below a while back in a garage where I went to buy some Thule rack parts advertised on Craigslist. The seller had sawed old worn out car tires in half and had made these “stands” with two kayaks stacked on their sides, with two under the bottom boat and another pair of them cushioning and stabilizing between the lower and the upper boat. I asked him how he kept them from falling over and he said he punched a couple of sets of holes through the treads where the two halves joined and threaded cable ties through them to bind them together. Didn’t have my phone so I didn’t get a photo but this funky sketch is how I remember them. I think I botched the orientation of the bottom-most tire half in the image with the boats – I believe they all were back to back like the single one I drew.

Drawback to this is you would have to remove the upper boat to get to the lower one. But the “stands” are free material and portable.

3 Likes

They may be able to keep up, the bum heart valve is finally starting to catch up with me. :frowning:

Spent the weekend being monitored for a arrhythmia. wanted to be fishing instead.
And got the blood-work results today that the hemo-goblins were lower than they should be, I might have to start paddling to look at the ducks…

My cousin has three kayaks on a rack similar to this. He rolls it out of the garage, and the boats are ready to grab at a moments notice. Not so if they were buried behind and under other garage clutter. “Too much trouble to dig them out just now.”

Trying to make a PVC rack could cost a lot more than you’d expect, especially the connecting pieces. But, if you do decide to go that route, SCREW the entire contraption together before ever applying any glue. Makes correction easier. In fact, you might get away without using any glue, just screws. Not 100% sure of that one.

This is a clever idea. A really quick way to connect those tire sections back-to-back would be to drill through and install a bolt (3/8th- or 7/16ths-inch diameter would be good), with a big washer on both sides or even a bigger piece of scrap flat stock steel if you happen to have such stuff on hand. You could cinch the connection far tighter that way and remove the wobbliness that is likely to exist if simple cable ties are used, and the stiffness of the tire material would probably mean that just one bolt per match-up would be adequate.

1 Like

The tires are a good idea if you have a couple lying around. Also the bottom one should be rotated 90 or it would be tippy I think.

1 Like