Designing for Cooler Latch Clearances

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Planning the layout of your raft frame and rower’s footwell is an important step in the process of designing your custom frame. One of the features you’re going to want your layout to have is enough room for you to be able to access your main cooler, even if you have a side cooler.

In this blog we’re going to share with you how we went about making sure a frame we recently built had this feature.

We started by mocking up frame that would have the rower sitting on the cooler and an adjacent footwell. For 14’ to 16’ rafts, the Canyon Cooler’s Navigator 150 makes a great main cooler.

The 150 QT cooler has a 41.5” wide base. We set it in a 20.5” bay, bar to bar. At this point about 11.5” of the cooler was hanging below the cross bar and about 7” above. (We know the picture doesn’t really look like that much is hanging below, but that’s what it was.) On a side note, that’s a Solgear® cooler cover on top. They’re great for protecting your cooler from the sun and for adding some padding to the top of your cooler.

At this point we were able to figure out the swing of the cooler latch.

About 2.5” is needed to allow for the latch to swing and release. This, of course, would be the minimum distance required, since it doesn’t include the space a hand would need to get to and operate the latch.

Next, we needed to make sure a side cooler in the footwell didn’t interfere with the access to the latches on the main cooler.

To figure this out, we added another bar and mocked up a 24” footwell, which would fit the 23.5” length of a 35 QT Canyon cooler. As you can see, this is too tight for access the main cooler’s latches.

So, we then added the minimum 2.5” for latch access and mocked up a 26.5” footwell. At this point our top-notch welder, and sometimes hand model, Alex Miller jumped in to help determine if this would work.

But, as you can see, access was still tricky. So, we added another half an inch, making the footwell 27”. That was much better.

This may seem like a little detail, just a half an inch, but it’s these details that can sometimes make life easy or frustrating.

Credit to Stewart Chumbley of Wild and Scenic Supply for asking us to help triple check this detail, to Canyon Coolers for making great raft compatible coolers, and to Alex Miller for elegant hand modeling.

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