It could have been worse.

Today I had to make three trips to a large well known home improvement store. On one of those trips I bought sound board (a fibrous material that’s about 3/4″ thick designed to absorb sound). Since our master bedroom is adjacent to the bathroom, we wanted to soundproof the bathroom a little. The wet wall in the bathroom seemed like a great place for the sound board. A wet wall is essentially 2 walls of 2×4’s with space for pipes in between them. That way, no base plates need to be cut. What’s a base plate? I’ll explain framing (and base plates) some other time.

Sound board is cheap. Think MDF (medium density fiberboard), but not as dense, and much looser. It comes in sheets of 4′ x 8′. I’ve carried a variety of building materials on top of our the Chevy Tracker before, including wood, drywall and cement backerboard, so I didn’t think this would be a problem. See example below…
see, wood on top of car

I often secure such building materials tightly with bungee cords (which work much better than rope).

I’m driving back from Home Depot with said sound boards. Less than a mile away from the store on a major road (but not a highway), the 2 boards I strapped to the top of the car, broke apart and fell off the back end of the car (@%##^&!).

Luckily the boards really only snapped where the 2 bungee cords held them in place. So each board snapped into 3 large, jagged pieces which then easily fit INTO the car (I had to pick them up off the road).It could have been worse. The boards could have been left on the street (which did briefly cross my mind). I still do have the board, and yes, I still plan on using it. Maybe tomorrow I’ll post a pic of the board in pieces.

sound board