New guy: OEM roof rack question ? (1 Viewer)

[sdcruiser]

Hey All, long time lurker, new owner here. Just picked up a 2012 GX460. One San Diego owner, 37k miles, knights armour silver, black interior. Totally stock (for now.)

I plan on having all the chrome blacked out,.....grill, door strips, window trim, door handles, factory roof rails,....all the chrome.

My Question: I have no cross bars on my truck now. I like the low profile of the OEM cross bars and they seem to be available on eBay for reasonable price. Can they be disassembled and painted? The factory cross bars are silver or chrome looking on their ends. Can they be taken apart? I'd like to have them painted black with the OEM roof rails that I plan on removing and taking to painter. Can I take the factory cross bars apart and have body shop paint the ends that attach / clamp onto the roof rails?

 

[xychromosome]

Hey All, long time lurker, new owner here. Just picked up a 2012 GX460. One San Diego owner, 37k miles, knights armour silver, black interior. Totally stock (for now.)

I plan on having all the chrome blacked out,.....grill, door strips, window trim, door handles, factory roof rails,....all the chrome.

My Question: I have no cross bars on my truck now. I like the low profile of the OEM cross bars and they seem to be available on eBay for reasonable price. Can they be disassembled and painted? The factory cross bars are silver or chrome looking on their ends. Can they be taken apart? I'd like to have them painted black with the OEM roof rails that I plan on removing and taking to painter. Can I take the factory cross bars apart and have body shop paint the ends that attach / clamp onto the roof rails?

Yes, the chrome ends pull apart from the cross bars, so you should be able to paint them separately

 

[r2m]

For the cross bars, you may want to rethink painting them if you ever plan on loading anything on them.
For the cross bars, you may want to use something more durable like a bed liner spray-on/paint-on. Depending upon what liner you use it may also have a rubberized texture with would help when loading up lumber, surfboards (you're in San Diego, right?), or anything else. Also a rubberized texture will give a matte look, if like that look? Then you don't ever have to worry about chipping or dinging those nice newly painted cross bars!

 

[urj150]

I second @r2m with reconsidering paint. I've never seen painting plasti-chrome turn out well for the long haul. It always chips, scrapes and generally looks like crap after a few hundred miles / uses. I'd strongly consider wrapping if that's the path you wanna take. A bit more resilient and redoing it is a fairly quick job if it ever comes to it. I also like the bedliner idea. My dad has a FJ with the entire roof done in bedliner and it's held up for going on 13 years now.