Sadly, You Get What You Pay For

Let's hope the real NASA puts more effort into its spacecraft that the maker of our spaceship-like cargo carrier. We went the budget route, buying a non-brand-name product from Sears. It looked good, but it proved to have some shortcomings.

For one, the mounting system was an inelegant system of flat metal plates and ordinary bolts rather than quick-release brackets designed for the purpose. More critically, the cheap plastic had all the torsional strength of a vinyl record. This proved to be a significant problem on our five hour drive on Christmas day.

Everything worked well for the first stint. As expected, the carrier cost us about 3 mpg, but it carried all of our luggage plus some additional items. The tradeoff was well worth the extra gas. After lunch, though, things started to go awry. I noticed that the car was suddenly very susceptible to the strong sidewinds we were facing; oddly, our fuel economy had also dropped substantially. I took a peek through the sunroof at the front edge of the carrier. The wind had pried the front of the carrier open by a full four inches. The whole thing hadn't opened, but the lock only latched the long side of the carrier, not the front. The force of the airflow acting on the soft plastic forced the leading edge wide open. The physics of the event were startling; examining the carrier later, I couldn't pull the cover as far open as the wind had.

Realizing that we had all the aerodynamic efficiency of a barn door, and fearing that we might lose our gear, I pulled over. The carrier returned to its original shape and we were not in danger of dropping our luggage, but there was no latch on the front and no way to prevent it from reopening. We spent the rest of the trip at a somewhat more relaxed pace, more in the interest of saving gas than holding onto our stuff, since we were going through gas at about a 40% higher rate and ran the risk of needing an unprecedented second gas stop. We were just lucky that there was no rain.

Before our return trip, I devised a crude but effective solution. Taking advantage of the overlapping lip that funnels the wind between the upper and lower halves of the carrier, I added a couple of chain links (which I'll probably switch out for carabiners eventually) through the front lip to keep the carrier closed. I also put some adhesive weatherstripping inside the front part of the carrier to keep out any rain that could slip through even when the carrier is closed.

The formerly swoopy cargo carrier now looks like the bepierced nose of a bookstore clerk, but now it works as intended.