I love to go fishing. As any of you fishermen know, it can be annoying and potentially gear damaging to pile fishing poles in the back of your 4Runner. I have been looking at roof mounted racks online. I am curious if any of you guys have one or made something that works good. Right now I have bungie cords hanging from the grab handles above the back doors. And I tried to mount a couple of hooks to the Rear panels but that doesn't seem to work too well. Any ideas or product reviews?

 

definitely thought about hanging my fly rods from the ceiling with some sort of velcro strap sewn to the headliner.

 

Well in my 1st gen I stuff the back end of the rods between the roll bar and the top, holds them really well but that won't help you. That and I have to stuff the tips under the visors.



So....... what I've done in the past on "other" rigs was take a 2' long piece if 2x6 and drill holes in it to mount to the front bumper. Then I'd take a half dozen 12" long pieces of 2" PVC and mount them to that. Stick the rods butt down into the PVC and there you go. The rods stick up a ways but since I was running down the beach chasing sharks there wasn't an issue of overhead clearance.

 

Don't even talk to me about fly rods and the trout you catch. I've printed out (in color) the pictures you've posted and I keep them in my tackle box....... freak trout upwards of 5lbs.......... here if I catch a trout that goes 18" and weighs 2lbs I'm a God for a week..........


On a better note you can build a rod carrier out of PVC for cheap that will strap to the top of your rig if you have a rack or rails.

 

I put U bolts through one side of a hard rifle case and then bolt the hard case down to my Yakima rack. Trout rods fit in it fine, longer salmon rods require cunnting one end out (which I did).

I realize thats outside of the care but I thought I'd throw it out there...

 

For my poles I used to have a gun rack that fit on the side window of the Bronco-
worked great!
It was plastic and might be called a gun or utility rack.

Doing something like limon32 has with a pvc pipe and caps would allow any size/diameter you choose. If you were worried about people getting into it drilling a hole straight through pipe and cap then running a lock through it would slow people down. Maybe a hitch lock?
edit:
DOH! Junkers called it, but I missed that part of his post. So, what Junkers said!