Bike Drawers

This is the whole reason we bought a van instead of an RV! We love our bikes – they have always lived indoors with us and we couldn’t stand the thought of them being exposed to the sun, elements, and potential thieves 24/7 on the back of a vehicle. However, we also couldn’t find any small RV plans that would easily allow us to store our bikes without them always being completely in the way, or without doing some major modifications to the RV. This is when we began to hatch a plan to build our own custom rig, and discovered the #vanlife community!

Our entire floor plan evolved from a few “must-haves”, based on the fact that our adventure would revolve around biking:

• Must be able to fit two mountain bikes and two touring bikes, plus all the relevant gear and tools and spare parts, in the back of the vehicle.
• Must be easily and quickly accessed – we didn’t want getting bikes in and out to become a long and tedious ordeal since we would be trying to ride pretty much every day.
• All of our gear needs to fit right with the bikes – we didn’t want to grab things from different spots all over the van when getting ready to ride.

After scouring the internet for ideas and several rounds of tetris in the basement with a taped off section simulating our van floor, we finally settled on a design: two large drawers (one for mountain bikes, one for touring bikes) that would slide out of the rear of the vehicle and bring all of our gear out to us.

We bought two sets of 5' long sliders from McMaster-Carr and built two boxes out of plywood (easier said than done). This is also the only spot in the van we used a prefinished plywood, because we thought the chances of water, grease, and oil spilling on the drawers or getting rained on while we frantically loaded bikes up might be pretty high.

Cutting a long straight section of plywood without a table saw was intimidating. We ended up holding down the straight edge by hand to stop the circular saw guide from sneaking under the straight edge and wobbling all over the place.

To make each drawer, we routered dado slots into the side panels and glued and screwed them into place on the bottom panel. We borrowed some huge clamps from a friend to hold everything together while the glue dried.

Drilling out holes to mount the drawers to the sliders.

We mounted the sliders onto long strips of 3” tall aluminum angle, using both VHB tape and bolts to secure them to the van floor. The VHB probably would have been enough, but apart from our house battery, this drawer assembly would be the heaviest and most deadly thing in our van in a crash (at least before we built out the rest of the cabinets and structure). We wanted to ensure it would not peel off the floor and come flying up to maim us in the event of a crash.

Marking holes for mounting the drawer slides onto the aluminum angles.

Drawer slides mounted onto the aluminum angle.

Success! Both the mountain bikes and both road bikes now fit in the back of the van!

Lessons Learned: Don’t buy cheap cutting tools!!! We learned this the hard way. Spending the extra money will increase your efficiency and reduce the amount of scrap, driving to hardware stores, frustration, and swear words created by using shitty tools.