I spent the afternoon installing my rhino rack - and ran into a surprise!
I installed the same system on my 4runner, so assembly went fine. Removing the old rack went well but I did have to drill and extract the last bolt on one side.
When I went to bolt on the backbone system... it didn't match.
The RTBL2 has 2 bolt holes front and rear and three in the middle. My factory rack only used two bolts per mounting point.
Not only that, the front two holes are further back than my factory bolts....
After double checking the part numbers and looking at photos, I decided that the part was correct.
At this point I'm thinking that I'm hosed - I murdered part of the old rack dealing with the rusted out bolt.
I'm pretty sure that support won't be open until Monday, and I've got other stuff going on this week.
So... I started eyeballing the rain gutter filler. I poked around a bit and found a bolt under the gutter filler.
Then I started prying... and yup, the bolt holes I needed were under the gutter trim.
After some shenanigans, I've got the rack fully mounted and installed.
Moral of the story - if you have a 98-99 (Mine was built 10/98) you may need to deconstruct more than just the roof rack!
I installed the same system on my 4runner, so assembly went fine. Removing the old rack went well but I did have to drill and extract the last bolt on one side.
When I went to bolt on the backbone system... it didn't match.
The RTBL2 has 2 bolt holes front and rear and three in the middle. My factory rack only used two bolts per mounting point.
Not only that, the front two holes are further back than my factory bolts....
After double checking the part numbers and looking at photos, I decided that the part was correct.
At this point I'm thinking that I'm hosed - I murdered part of the old rack dealing with the rusted out bolt.
I'm pretty sure that support won't be open until Monday, and I've got other stuff going on this week.
So... I started eyeballing the rain gutter filler. I poked around a bit and found a bolt under the gutter filler.
Then I started prying... and yup, the bolt holes I needed were under the gutter trim.
After some shenanigans, I've got the rack fully mounted and installed.
Moral of the story - if you have a 98-99 (Mine was built 10/98) you may need to deconstruct more than just the roof rack!
