Battery in, just a few little things like covering the terminals. The battery tray is extremely solid, probably a bit overkill & doesn't move a millimetre.

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Are we there yet!..... almost there!

New bracket to sit solar panels between second spare tyre & additional fuel tanks. 3mm industrial teflon base to help slide solar panels into bracket & rubber cushioning around the inside face of the bracket. In the meantime have added a handle to the top on the panels for carrying & help putting them up onto the roof.

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Nice installation, great work.  FL2 now gone and have a couple of items left for sale:-

Brodit active iPhone holder + Brodit dash clip,
Bluetooth Music Streaming Module.

The original topic of this thread was about the awning & enclosure:

Now that I have used it in the topend of Australia & the west coast I can say that it is very well made. The awning is well made & works well. I looked at other makes attached to car roof racks & this one has a heavier extrusion at the back to mount it.

You really need 2 people to set it up & fold it away, but this is the nature of this design of awning. A single rope attached to the centre of the extrusion where the poles go to the ground would help for a single person. One rope attached in the centre of the extrusion then lightly pegged into the ground, would help a lot for a single person setup & packing away.

The enclosure is also well made, but it is difficult to peg down near the car for stronger winds. I think a separate tent & or mosquito enclosure is the way to go & you can then claim a camping spot & still be able to drive off to look at local attractions.

We also found mosquitoes hid between the enclosure & the car, so when packing it up you need to be on your guard. From this aspect it would also be better to have a separate tent or mosquito enclosure away from the car so there are less places for mosquitoes to hide.

Ideally the enclosure should have the mosquito mesh on the outside & the solid covers inside, but I have a feeling no one makes them like this this. We have the mosquito mesh on the outside of out decades old hiking tent.

Conclusion: I would still get an awning, add a single centre rope for single person packing. But get a seperate enclosure.

The benift of using the awning for an enclosure is you don't have to carry another set of tent poles. But it is still good to have additional poles for the enclosure's additional awnings on all sides. I used my sand flag poles for 2 additional poles, a bit short but they were stiff enough & anything is better than nothing.

You can use the enclosure's sides as addition awnings on all 3 sides which gives you a lot of additional shade at different times of day to help greatly reducing radiated heat. The double roof, awning & the enclosure's ceiling reduces heat a lot, especially as the ceiling is low as the Freelander is not the tallest of cars for mounting an awning.

One could mount the awning further out on the end of the cross bar but then it"s more vulnerable to damage on bush tracks.

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For no real reason I had a browse through this thread and must say I'm impressed at the creativity displayed
At no point though in the construction process was any reference made to stopping for tea, or a beer. Perhaps that's why these projects are so successful

The design process for all these items was over months to years, so a lot of tea & coffee..... & beer! The most efficient part of the design process was actually to get off each of the projects a number of times entirely to clear one's mind!


Another little project was 6 aluminium tent pegs for softer ground. 12mm diameter, 500 mm long, 4.75 mm 304 stainless steel pins in end about 15mm & also for hook. Also tapped an M6 16mm bolt into the bottom end & ground it to a point.

A total of 1.008 kg for the 6 pegs & they were cheaper than buying 6 similar zinc plated steel tent pegs!

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Lightwater, you’re just showing off now. If I owned any tools I’d show you construction