Hi all,

First post here in the hope that some kind soul would help this elderly d-i-yer determine if something was likely to work or not please?

Basically, the Mrs is no longer able to lift one end of a folding wooden boat onto the roof rack of our mini MPV and I'm trying to come up with a d-i-y version of ideas I've seen on the net.

Basically it's a sideways extension to a rectangular (Thule) steel car roof bar that should help me get one end up onto the bar on my own and then lift the other end of the boat onto the non-extended roof bar and from there, walk the boat over to the middle of the bars (and remove the extension).

The internal extension could be a 1.1m length of 25x15x1.5mm 316 grade, seam welded (I believe) stainless steel box tube (with the 15mm plane vertical) that will be slid inside a fairly close fitting 2mm thick steel roof rectangular box 'bar' so that 600mm of the extension is exposed (so 500mm is inside / supported by the outer tube along it's entire length).

I'm only looking for ball park figures here and so we can assume ideal circumstances and so the question is would such a solution be likely to support say 40kg of vertical load as applied at 400mm out from the mounting(where the inner tube slides into the outer)?

I guess for these calcs it's a 400mm long box section beam (ignoring the bit past the nominal centre of the load) with 500mm of support at one end (cantilever)?

Thanks for your time in any case etc. ;-)

Cheers, Tim