Kuat Ibex Customizable Overland Truck Bed Rack - Aluminum - 300 lbs

Video Transcript for Installation Guide for the Kuat Ibex Customizable Overland Truck Bed Rack - 2023 Jeep Gladiator

Hi everyone, Aidan here with etrailer. If you're looking for a modular bed rack system for your 2023 Jeep Gladiator, so you can deck this out with camping accessories and go overlanding, but you still want it to be easy to remove if you want to use your truck like a truck, then the Kuat Ibex could be a really good fit for you. Let's check it out. So for me, one of the biggest draws of the Ibex is the ease of installation and the ability to remove it if you're not using it all the time. This is a no drill bolt on installation and you've really just got four main attachment points for the rack in each corner. If you've got the utility track in your Jeep, it's even easier because you just leave these brackets behind bolted into place and just undo one bolt from each clamp.

Lift the rack off with a friend, leave those mounting points behind in the utility track and when you're ready to set up again, just drop it right back down and bolt it into place. If you don't have the utility track, that's okay. It comes with C clamps too and it's just as easy to get reinstalled. But on its own, the rack is pretty basic. It's really a blank canvas for you to customize to your heart's content.

You can get a bunch of different accessories directly from Kuat that will make this a little bit more versatile in my opinion. Like Molle panels on the side or the front where you can attach gear that you already have. You can get a crossbar riser kit to give you some better cab clearance if you wanted to haul some longer items and basically have that higher clearance if you needed it. Or you can choose to just pick up their T-nut kit and channel mount something a bit more DIY to one of the many channels around the entire rack, whether it be on one of these side brackets or on the top or underside of your crossbars. The whole rack is a black powder coated aluminum construction.

The aluminum's gonna make things pretty lightweight, so as long as you've got a friend to help you unload it, it's gonna be fairly easy to remove and especially to install because you pretty much do all your assembly on the ground and lift the assembled rack and just set it down in place. It's not too bad and that black powder coat just gives it a really nice solid look. Kuat is great when it comes to fit and finish and the Ibex is no different, but with that aluminum construction, you're not sacrificing capability. It's still gonna be able to handle 300 pounds loaded up all around it, and that is your dynamic moving weight. So even if you're driving around off road, they can handle that 300 pounds.

So just be sure to abide by that when you're loading up your accessories. Now, personally I really like the way the Ibex sits right now in its full height configuration, but you do have the option during your initial assembly and set up process to take out a middle section on your uprights here and bring this down to a mid height rack. That could be really beneficial if you plan on putting a tent up here and you want it to just be a bit closer to the ground. But for me personally, it comes ready to go in that full height configuration. It's less work to put together in the full height configuration and for me, I just would want it like that even if I did have a tent because it's just below the roof line, it's going to not really block our back window at all, and I think it just looks good on the Jeep matching the boxy shape of the cab here and not sticking out. But for some height measurements from the bed rail to the tallest point of the rack, in this full height configuration you're working with 21 and 11/16 of an inch. In the mid height configuration, you'd be looking at 12 and 1/8 of an inch. If you are mounting a tent or really anything on top of the bars and you are really concerned about height clearance, say you're going jeeping and you're going through some areas that have trees and that height clearance could be a factor for you, then yeah, the mid height configuration probably is better for you, but it just comes down to how you're using your Jeep and what kind of environment you're driving in. These bars up top are gonna be really easy to adjust if you need to, just loosen up some screws on the top and bottom and you can slide each bar back and forth to match up to different crossbar spreads. So if you needed to attach certain accessories that needed a wider or more narrow spread, you can find that and make it work or just slide both of these forward to the cab to make room in your truck bed for some taller items if you don't have time to fully remove the Ibex. One thing to keep in mind though is your crossbar dimensions. The width at the widest point is going to be three and three quarters of an inch, and the height will be one and three quarters of an inch. If you're looking at accessories, just know that these bars are extremely wide and most clamps will not be able to open up wide enough to wrap around. They are still very thick bars, but the limiting factor will likely be the width. So if you're looking at mounting things up here, I'd look into things that could be channel mounted, but as far as bed racks on the Jeep are concerned, you do have more options than just the Kuat Ibex. I'd recommend looking into the Front Runner Slimline II bed racks. Those are gonna have just really solid construction and a wide range of accessories to choose from. Don't get me wrong, the Ibex still has plenty to choose from and a lot of 'em I really like, but the Front Runner catalog of accessories is just vast and you'll have a lot more options there, but it's not going to be as easy of as an install process and it's not going to be as easy to remove when it's not in use. Plus, it's only available in that mid height configuration. So I don't know that I would love it as much on the Gladiator. I really do like the way the Ibex fits here and with the accessories, they do have available like a bottle opener or a grab handle to help you get up in here, or the Molle panels in the crossbar risers. I think you've got a lot of really good options that can still get you on some pretty good adventures. But for me, like I said before, the big draw is that install process. And if you're curious as to what that looks like, follow along and we'll show you how we did it. The first part of the install is really just done from the ground, so we're gonna be left with this structure here and all we really have to do is loosen it up and put it on the Jeep. But for that initial part of the install, you just really need to assemble your two halves and join them together with the crossbars. The halves are labeled really well with your A, B, C, and D uprights and then G and F, horizontal sections that basically join those uprights together. Everything is side specific and unique shapes, so they really only go together one way and it makes the whole process pretty simple, if not maybe a bit time consuming. But when you have those halves together, there's just one bolt on either side that joins the crossbar to those halves. The one thing I'll say to watch for is as you're tightening down your crossbars, just measure on both sides to make sure that they're spaced evenly. That way nothing's crooked as we go to put it up, but with this all put together, we can turn our attention to the middle of each crossbar to an orange block. That orange block is the piece we wanna loosen up using one of our included Allen keys and that'll allow these crossbars to telescope out and adapt to the width of our truck bed. With both those screws loosened up, you can grab a friend. I've got Matt and he's gonna just help me pull this apart like that so that we can match this up to the fitment of our truck bed rails. We're just gonna go straight into lifting it from here though, and we're gonna set it on top of the Jeep's bed rails. Now for us, it's looking like we're actually spaced apart perfectly, but having an extra set of hands is really helpful because if you're not perfectly aligned, you can make sure that from both sides it's supported at least so that you can let go and do the clamps hands free. With the rack squared up, I wanna do a brief overview of the clamp hardware. We can separate it into two halves. This section will be the bottom half with our main attachment point and the block and bolts that will attach that to our track system. And then this section here will be the top half of our clamp. Again, this main section is what will attach the two halves together with this large bolt going down through. And these T-nuts and bolts will attach that main block to our Ibex. I'm gonna start with the bottom section of the clamp though. With this one we can loosely preassemble everything before it goes into that track rail, making sure that the T is facing towards the block and just loosely tightening those bolts. That whole assembly can then slide into our utility track. And I'm gonna put this one all the way to the tailgate for our rear attachment point. For the top half, we're gonna need to individually slide these T-nuts in first since the block is just a little bit large and we'll run into a few things. We'll slide them into the lowest channel of the Ibex here and just loosely line it up with the bottom half of our clamp. We can always move this around later if we didn't get it perfect, that's fine, and I'll line up the face of that block and get those bolts started in the T-nuts. Now these ones you might have a little bit of a harder time getting started by hand, so if you need to, just grab the included Allen key to help it get started and we're just leaving all this loose so that we can line things up a little bit more easily. We can always check to make sure that it's fully installed and doesn't pull out. We'll repeat this process three more times for the other four corners before joining it all together and tightening things up. With all four corners loosely in place, I'll drop the largest bolt through to join the two halves together. And I'm just gonna get this again, loosely installed because there's a certain order I found is best for tightening this down, and that's going to be these top two side bolts here as we put a little bit of pressure on the top half, then the bottom into the utility track, and then that bigger bolt on top last. Again, just repeat that for all four corners but when you've tightened all four clamps, you can go back to that orange block up top on those sliding crossbars and tighten it back down if you haven't already. I personally like to wait until all the clamps are done to do that, but after that you're done. Your installation's complete and you can just give it a good shake test and make sure that nothing's rattling or was accidentally left loose because there are a lot of bolts throughout the whole thing and it's easy to forget maybe one during that whole process of tightening things down, but when you're happy with the fit, that'll do it for our look at and installation of the Kuat Ibex truck bed rack on our 2023 Jeep Gladiator. My name's Aidan and thanks for watching.