Surfing Waves

Ok, so today was the first time I drove with 2 boards on my roof rack...

With one board on the other day, and on the way to the beach today, there was no noise- a bit of flapping of bag handles, a bit of a hum with the 2 boards on, like a motorbike.

But on the way back from Cayton Bay tonight, we arranged the boards as usual, but swapped round in terms of which was on top... As we were driving home, I swear- it sounded like the car was filled with angry bees! Phillwilson has reported this same problem on his car, too.
We both have pretty small cars, though.

Does anyone else have this problem? heh heh. It's not a worry or anything, the boards are secured- but I'm just interested to know : )

With my soft rack... 95% of the time there is a horrible buzz. With one board. It sucks.

Yeh that's what happened wih Phill's car, less so with mine. I don't know why, because mine is smaller (Nissan Micra), and so surely we would encounter problems with that instead of his slightly bigger one. But I don't know...

Today we were told by a random but helpful neighbour that tying the front of the board bag to the front grill thing would help the nose from lifting up so much... going to try it next time, maybe it will reduce the noise?

What car have you got? And how long is your board?

Put a couple of twists in the straps and it'll be hush hush.

The exact thing happened to me until i found out that doing a little jiggery pokery with the front passenger seat allowed me to fit the board inside.

Once, with two boards on the roof, me and friends thought it was the car playing up! We stopped and looked at the engine in despair!

But yeah, a few twists should work. Make the straps as tight as you can. And put all the loose ends inside if they're long enough. I think you just have to play around with them a little bit and they'll quieten down.

Yeah, it's the straps vibrating somewhere. Sometimes, it's the lashing to the car. It's like blowing on a blade of grass.. you might not do anything to the straps, and one day the wind is blowing just the right way as you're driving and bzzzzzzzzzzz

LadyAsh wrote:Today we were told by a random but helpful neighbour that tying the front of the board bag to the front grill thing would help the nose from lifting up so much... going to try it next time, maybe it will reduce the noise?

What car have you got? And how long is your board?

Push the board to the front of the bag before you tighten the straps, that stops any annoying flapping.
Yes I get buzzing, twisting the straps usually helps.

So it's a fairly common problem then...
It's nice to know I'm not alone *wipes tear* heh

I'll try the twisted strap idea, thanks for the tips guys...

btw ChasingDaylight... I can get one 7ft board in the car, but it was an extreme measure, and I had to have someone sit the other side of it to tell me what was going on out the left window! The curse of having the smallest car in the world, I guess. But it's cool to know I can do it in a pinch.

I invested in a set of Thule roofbars, well worth the money, then tie down the straps to stop them flapping and turn the stereo up !

Humming motorbikes ?

PapaW wrote:Put a couple of twists in the straps and it'll be hush hush.

shove an old towel under front strapes always works

my mate is full sure he can tell when i'm over the speed limit because he can hear a humming noise from the roof of the car on his side...

never heard it myself... thought maybe he'd been dumped on his head once too often lol