Garage: bikes and storage

We have two bicycles (regular mountain and electric fat tire) and inflatable drop stitch kayak, which we want to carry in our trips. With the bed in the middle position, the van has the garage with the ample space, which should be enough for those items. The question was how to put bikes in the garage, safely attach them and have the room  for kayak or other stuff.

First idea was to build a sliding tray with holders for bikes using the heavy duty long cabinet slides, like I have seen in many conversions. However, entertaining for a while with this version I realized that there are issues with this idea:
- the e-bike is heavy (60lbs) and it is not easy to raise it up and put on the tray;
- the heavy duty long (50") slides are quite expensive;
- the tray and slides will have some thickness (at least 2-3") which will reduce the useful height of the garage.

Experimenting with putting ebike in the van I figured out that it is quite easy to raise the rear wheel on the floor and then just to roll it inside the van. Thus I decided to use this method and made two very simple holders for the front fork by using pair of  quick release skewers (short for the mountain bike and  long for the ebike, which has quite wider fork)

  










Since the ebike's  disk break mechanism was extending quit out from the fork, I also made a rectangular hole in the black plastic panel and insulation of the door to hide it. In winter, I do not use bikes, so it will be filled with small block of rigid foam insulation.



The pictures below show bikes before and after loading in the van. The front wheel of course has to be removed and be tied to the bike by bungee cord.

 

 

 

This arrangement happened to be easy to use and quite space efficient, leaving plenty of room in the middle between bikes and on the left and right banks for additional stuff like for example boxes:

That was proved in  the first trip to Ontario, Canada that we made with full load: two bikes, kayak in the bag, two paddles, three camping chairs, a tent, 25 gal of water, full fridge, 25lbs of tools (just in case something goes wrong) and all other trip items.

 

Of course, with the bed so high we needed a ladder to get into: