Thule Box Repairs - The Don'ts
· Nov 22, 01:15 PM
Part 1 – The Breaking (this should probably be verified before publication)
In June 2008 Patrick Weaver unlocked and unloaded the trailer that had been sitting in our driveway for a year. In it, was a pretty new Thule box that he sold to Lars and Kristina. This was right before he was heading back to VT and they were heading up to Anchorage. The box went into their garage, which given their impending departure was a bit of a disaster zone. Sometime during the week after they bought it, Lars lost his footing, or stumbled, or stepped wrong and landed squarely on the top of the box. Very squarely. The top was caved in and there was a 30” crack running length-wise on each side of the box. It sat quietly out of the way for the next 18 months.
Part 2 – The Repair (where I almost took pictures, but didn’t)
Over the course of last weekend I staked a claim to the broken box. The deal was simple. I would repair it (fiberglass and epoxy); Marshall, Evelyn and I would use it for our fall racing trip; Lars and Kristina would end up with a functional Thule box. So last Sunday I spent some time with the fiberglass repair kit. It was a slow process, but not really that difficult since I was working on the inside where the look of the finished product wasn’t a big concern. Mostly the garage was permeated by the smell of curing epoxy. Felice’s bedroom was invaded. I moved the box back to Lars and Kristina’s garage, which helped with the smell.
Part 3 – The Drive
When Marshall and I mounted the box (alongside his backwards facing Thule – giving us two for the trip) things looked good. If anything the repair job was a little bit stiffer than the rest of the box. The epoxy was cured, the fiberglass was solid. We were good to go.
We loaded up Friday morning, with skis in Marshall’s box and gear (clothes, the Thanksgiving Turkey, bindings, etc) in Lars and Kristina’s box. (We didn’t need to have skis in both boxes, Zach and Nathan were bring 25 or 30 pairs up to West for us.) We had a lot of room in the car (well, we could see out the rear window) for our drive to Sun Valley.
It was windy going across eastern Oregon. Burns itself wasn’t that bad, but I think 50 mph is a pretty reasonable estimate for the cross/tailwind we faced. About 20 miles past Burns we heard a horrible ripping sound. All three of us exclaimed “the box”, and an instant later a huge piece of black plastic flew off the car and landed across the road. We traveled another 100 feet before we stopped, but didn’t here anything else hit the road. Sure enough, when we got out and looked, half of Lars and Kristina’s box was gone, but everything in their box (including the turkey) was still there.
Part 4 – Analysis
When I went to retrieve the half of the box that was no longer attached, I assumed that it had failed. However, that was not the case. The fiberglass repair jobs on the side of the box were still solid. Instead, the top looked like it had been ripped open. My best guess is that there were some small cracks (or maybe only stress fractures) in the top of the box from where Lars had landed on it that I didn’t notice. The combination of 150 miles at high speed with massive cross-winds put a lot of stress on those small cracks. The result was spectacular – in a bad way. If anyone who knows more about ABS would like to correct my assumptions, please do so.
The big lesson for me here is that I’m not going to bother trying to repair another box. At least not one that’s had it’s top smashed in.
This picture exaggerates the damage quite a bit. We had to break/tear the broken pieces so they would fit in the car while we took them to a dumpster. The initial break was only in two.
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Brayt, I believe that you were around for a similar mishap with Walt and Colin on the way from the County to the Kingdom a few years back. Perhaps you are the bringer of bad tidings for boxes?
— Will Sweetser Nov 24, 05:04 AM #