Storm Chasing Hail Guard Prototype
The most unpredictable risks in storm chasing often surprise non-chasers: other drivers, lightning and the one we’ve all dealt with: hail. If—like me—you grew up in the east—you likely haven’t seen the kind of devastating hail storms that are common out in the plains. Hail can shoot out in surprising places out of a big storm, and often at the times where you want to get photos. I’ve been in baseball hall before (writeup and video here), and while you need real fortifications to get through that unscathed, I’ve long wanted some kind of protection for my windshield to buy me a bit more time up close to the storm before taking my escape route. So this year, right before heading out chasing (my writeup of this year’s trip here) I threw together a prototype hail guard. I used my standard Thule racks as a base on the roof of my Toyota RAV 4 hybrid:
To that I added a Rhino Platform Rack RR42115BF from the great people at ETrailer.com, who answered my question with a write up here. This rack I think will offer some protection of my roof but mostly I picked it to act as a foundation for the hail guard itself.
To that rack I added four Rhino RR95AB Stow It Utility holders. These are made to securely hold things like shovels and I figured out that they worked well on 1-5/8” Plastic Framing Rail that McMaster-Carr sells along with fittings.
The tubing is strong but soft enough that I just used a tubing cutter to cut it:
The tubing fittings can be glued using regular PVC cement. I was rushing around trying to get on the road so I only finished the frame before I left (with of course several last minute Home Depot trips). I was amazed that it had only a minor “wooshing” sound and no whistling or anything and didn’t bounce as much as I thought it would.
Somewhere in an Ohio motel parking lot I got the mesh attached. This was some plastic material I had laying around, which I secured with bungee cord looped around and clipped back to itself.
I added a second layer of the mesh at a truck stop somewhere in Nebraska.
The Rhino clips mean the entire thing can easily be retracted when not in storm chasing mode (this picture is after the trip with 7000+ miles of bugs and wear and tear):
In the end I was pleasantly surprised with how the whole thing worked out. The unit was very solid, and other than a bit of wind rushing noise didn’t make any noise problems (I used to have a bike rack that would whistle and drive me crazy). And while I didn’t get to test it in real conditions, it did give me a bit of peace of mind to stick around storms a bit longer. Before next season I’ll test out the plastic mesh to see if I should change it to metal. Again, all I’m hoping to have it survive is the occasional golf ball, not ride out a hail-pocalypse:
