I have a Dissent roof rack ordered but will be attending Overland Expo East before it gets here and need to mount my James Baroud RTT and awning. That being said, I am attempting to mount said tent and awning to my OEM roof rack. I'm hoping that by adding a third cross rail I can safely do so for this, relatively, short trip. Does anyone know the easiest way to obtain a third rail? And secondly, anyone see any issues with mounting the tent and awning temporarily with this set up? Thanks for any feedback!
Roof Rack Cross Bar Needed
- Thread starter Motorush
- Start date
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LC or LX?
awesomeissquid
SILVER Star
There are some posts of others doing this by adding 1 or 2 additional crossbars to support the weight. That said I have 2x crossbars I pulled off my 2000 LC. PM me if you are interested in them.
- Thread starter
- #4
Shifthead, it's going on a 2005 LX470. Awesomeissquid, thanks, I'll shoot you a PM.
I'm not sure LC crossbars are compatible with LC racks. I recently installed an LC rack on my LX because the LX rack is shorter than the LC rack. I'm not sure if all years are like this, mine is an '05. I changed mine because it was too short for the roof top tent I got and it really only supported about half the tent, so more crossbars would not help. In fact, due to the curvature of the roof, more crossbars would have caused a problem as the tent would not have been able to touch down on all the bars, as I recall.
You might consider pulling out the rack rail trim to expose the additional mounting points and fab a couple of temporary mounts, or find an LC rack like I did. There were plenty for sale when I was looking, assuming you LX rack is short like mine.
@Motorush I went on tnutz.com and ordered some 8020 (3 bars 58 inches long) was like 130$ then I went to Home Depot and bought a 2ft piece of 1 inch steel flat bar 1/4” thick. Slid some 5/16 stainless bolts in the channel of the 8020. Mark spots on the flat bar , drill it and sandwich to the factory roof rails. I put my tepui rtt tent like this no problems. I also mounted my Amazon awning to the bars.
for a cheaper alternative since you’re getting a rack soon you could use uni strut instead of the 8020
for a cheaper alternative since you’re getting a rack soon you could use uni strut instead of the 8020
- Thread starter
- #7
Thanks @soup222002, definitely some good suggestions in there. Because this trip is so short (the Overland Expo venue is 30 minutes away), I may decide to just mount everything to the existing rack and, if it feels solid, roll with it for this shirt road trip. Can't wait to get my Dissent gear which was ordered in June with 16 to 18 weeks lead time. Thanks again for the help!
