Crossbar Adapter for Thule Caprock Platform Racks - Qty 4

Video Transcript for Thule Caprock Platform Rack Crossbar Adapter Review

Hi everyone. Aiden here with etrailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at these clamp adapters for your thule cap rock platform racks. There's a couple different ways you can mount these cap rock platforms up to your vehicle, but this is going to be the adapter piece that lets you attach it to crossbars. So whether you've got a roof rack, an over the bed rack, or a ladder rack, you can clamp it around those bars and use that as your point of attachment. Now the way these adapters attach to the cap rock is pretty straightforward, on the underside of the slats that make up the platform, there's T track, and when you're setting up the whole thing, getting it assembled, you'll just slide these clamps into those tracks underneath.

Now these adapters do bridge between two of these bars, so it will be set up with those two kind of in the middle, and then from there you've got the clamp piece underneath that will bolt in around your crossbars. Now that bar on the underside of the clamp can be flipped one way or the other because it is kind of curved to accommodate for different thicknesses of crossbars. And thule does include a tool with the whole thing to just help judge which way it should be going. So you can use it to measure your crossbar thickness and know whether you need to flip that clamp up like that or down like we have it here on our thicker crossbars. As far as exact dimensions go, it can work with crossbars at a minimum thickness of three quarters of an inch, or a maximum thickness of one and seven eighths of an inch.

These are locking so you do have that security aspect built in. And the one downside that we ran into with the crossbar adapters is they do limit your crossbar spread a little bit. So this is maybe a bit more specific to the truck bed applications though. Because these clamps have to join between two bars, they sit right in the middle there, and on our short platform that does limit our crossbar spread. We've got it as wide as it'll go right now and that's only about 29 inches which for a truck bed wasn't a lot.

So for our ladder rack it didn't work really well. But I do think for a roof rack application that it would actually work really well, because you don't have typically super long crossbar spreads on a roof rack. So in those applications, I think it would work really well and you can always move these slats back and forth to move the clamp, you just maybe would need one of the longer cap rock systems to make that work better. Because this is one of the shortest ones they offer, we just don't have much room for movement with these bars if we wanted them to be spaced evenly. And that's really all there is to it.

If you've already got an over the bed rack, a ladder rack, or a roof rack and you're looking to attach the cap rock to it, then I think the crossbar adapters make the most sense because it utilizes what you already have to attach the whole system. If you're starting from scratch, I'd maybe look into some other methods, whether it's using the exporter mounts to mount it to your truck bed directly to those uprights. Or if you've got a vehicle with a roof that has maybe some raised rails, maybe just look into directly mounting to those raised rails. The cap rock system offers a lot of options for mounting and a lot of those are just cleaner from the start. But again, if you've already got the hardware and the crossbars in place, you might as well utilize 'em, and it does work really well. This has just been our quick look at the crossbar adapters for your thule cap rock platform racks. Thanks for watching.