To see if this custom-fit item will work for you please tell us what vehicle you'll use it with.
These heavy-duty, aluminum crossbars work with Rhino-Rack legs to create a sturdy roof rack. The square bars include built-in C-channels for mounting Rhino-Rack heavy-duty, contractor-grade accessories.
Features:
Rhino-Rack HD Crossbars - Black - Qty 2:Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
John: Hey guys, John, here from etrailer.com. Today we have our 2017, Nissan Titan we're test fitting the Rhino-Rhack's Vortex Aero roof rack system. This is designed to help add extra cargo carrying capacity to our vehicle. So maybe we have our bed completely full, or we're wanting to transport a kayak, which won't fit in the bed of our truck. We can toss it up here or add a cargo basket to get extra cargo carrying capacity, as well as use our hitch and maybe our truck bed.The Vortex Aero Crossbars come in black, as we have installed on our Titan today, as well as silver. Both of these options are available here at etrailer.com.
They have an aluminum construction, so they're lightweight and durable. Plus we don't have to worry about them rusting over time. Even though they are lightweight, our roof rack does have a weight capacity of 165 pounds.However, I do recommend checking out your owner's manual just to make sure we're not going over any weight ratings that the manufacturer has. Our Vortex Crossbars have an aerodynamic design. This is an upgrade from the traditional round or square crossbars, and this is going to help reduce wind noise and drag compared to those other styles.Our Vortex Aero system does come with lot cores here for our legs.
And then we also have a plastic lock core that can be upgraded, but it's out here on our cap for our crossbar. If we unlock it, we can remove it. And now we gain access to the T-slot area on the crossbar. This is used to mount different accessories that'll have the T-slot bolt with it. Normally or older accessories will just have a clamp, but some newer ones, we can utilize this for just more of a clean fit.
We'll just slide the T-slot in there, then trim the top rubber, a rubber strip here to make it look natural. And this rubber strip is used to help cut down on wind noise and drag. There'll be a whistling sound without this rubber strip installed. So it's a really nice feature that Rhino-Rack includes with the crossbar.Rhino-Rack did think of our vehicles' protection when it comes to their roof racks. This bottom part of the fit kit here, this is rubber, and so it won't damage our paint as well as this clamp.
It actually has a thin piece of rubber here so we don't have metal touching our vehicle. Let's get some measurements here to see how this interacts with the roof of our vehicle. From the roof to the bottom of the crossbar, is about three and a half inches. You shouldn't really have any problems mounting any accessories on here. There's plenty of room for any clamps that we'll use.And then from the roof to the top of the crossbar sits, about four and three quarter or five inches. That's a good measurement to keep in mind for if you want to keep this installed on top of our vehicle when we pull into a garage or something like that, or if we have an accessory that we want to mount on here. We can take the height of the accessory and then add five inches so we know how high that's going to sit on our vehicle.Rhino-Racks clamp system here, sits nice and secure in our vehicle. I can actually grab the Crossbars over the legs and our entire vehicle moves when I shake it. That just gives us some peace of mind of how secure this is fitting to our vehicle. Now that we've gone over some of the features of this crossbar system, let's go ahead and install it together.We'll start off by removing the cover on our leg. Use the included keys and it will swing out to the left. And then we will move over to our fit kit here, which has three pieces, the plastic piece, rubber piece, and then our clamp. Won't mess with our clamp till we get the crossbar up on the roof. But the plastic piece has an arrow, as well as the rubber pieces. It has an arrow. If we refer to our instructions, it tells us how these need to be oriented according to how we mount the crossbar to our roof rack.So we will put the rubber piece in place. You just got to kind of move the lips around and make sure it sits on there, nice and tight. And then our instructions say it had this arrow pointing outwards. So you just press the clips to secure on our foot. Next we'll grab our crossbar and then we will take the measurement tabs that go underneath. There are the measurement strips that go underneath the crossbar. They're stored on the crossbar so when we open up the package, make sure you get them out. And then these have measurements on them and we'll refer to our instructions for exactly where we need to cut these. So that gives us an exact measurement for where our legs will be mounted on the underside of our Crossbars.For our application today, we need to clip at 157. And once you make your clip. I'll just take a razor blade here and just kind of flatten everything out. Make sure there're no pieces that are sticking straight up, because then what we got to do is put our leg and butted up right up against this plastic piece.So got everything straightened out, place the zero and first we push that all the way to the track till it stops. Now we're ready to add our leg to the underside of our crossbar. With our leg we have this T-bolt here and we're going to need to loosen up the screw. So we'll flip our leg over and then use the included tool to loosen up that bolt. And now the T-bolt sits more loose. We can slide it right on to our crossbar.Say it, and then cruise, and we're going to slide this all the way up to the measurement, the rubber strip that we just cut. We use the tool and just tighten down that T-bolt again. And then we use the tool, this actually is a little unique. It has a slight curve to it. We're going to tighten down this bolt until it straightens out. Once it straightens out, now we know we have the right torque on that bolt.Insert this, the remaining strip, then we're going to cut that off and clean it up a little bit here and we will repeat the same process for the other side of the crossbar. Now that we have the legs on the bottom of our crossbar, it's time to install the rubber strips. There will be four that are actually hidden inside the Crossbars. We'll take the cap off, turn the crossbar upside down the fallout, and we will just feed them through. We've already got three of the strips installed. So it's bottom up end to end. You'll kind of wiggle it back and forth because there's a groove here. So try to feed one through one end of the crossbar T-slot and just kind of feed it back and forth until it lays flat here. Any bubbles, just push in and again, feed it back and forth. Now that we have it all in place, we will go ahead and cut off any excess and then we place on our cap. And now we are ready to toss our crossbars up on top of our roof.A few things I'd like to note before we set it on top, make sure that the Rhino-Rack sticker is going to be facing forward for a vehicle. And then there are some stickers included with your kit and you can put the sticker under each of the feet so that we can remember exactly how it's sitting on our truck. So if you take the crossbars off, we need easily put them back up. We already have our front crossbar mounted. According to the instructions, there will be measurements on where we need to place it here between our. We'll measure from in between our doors here up and now we'll place the rear bar. We'll take a measurement from our instructions to figure out where we need to have this rear bar sitting. Kind of set it in the general area, measure from the center of the front crossbar back to the center of your rear crossbar.That looks good. So we'll move to the driver's side now and move that leg around till it's sitting where it needs to be as well. Now that we have our rear crossbar in place, we will loosen up this bolt here, and we'll take our clamp from our foot pack, our fit kit. We'll put it through this hole here on the clamp and then get it started in the nut that's already sitting in our leg. Now this vehicle is a little bit tricky, most vehicles, there won't be a rubber strip here, or we'll look at this piece of trim and it just pulls right down. This rubber piece though is permanently installed on the truck. And so we're going to lower this outer lip and feed our clamp in there. And then just need to push it down and try to get this corner as tight up against the vehicle frame as we can.So this is definitely something where we're going to get it started on one side and then moved to the other side and get it started over there and just moved back and forth until we have the clamps sitting tight up against the vehicle. So let's get in tight. Let's move to the other side and then we'll just keep working back and forth until it sits nice and tight like we have here at the front. On the driver's side, this is kind of what we ran into before or having a little trouble getting this clamp to sit well. So we're just going to take a spacer tool here. We have a couple of different options here at etrailer.com and we're just going to try to push down and make enough room for this clamp to sit comfortably against our doorframe. Another thing I had to do is while I'm tightening down this clamp, right, tighten this down, and I'm just kind of pulling our crossbar a little bit to try to get to fit.Right, normally on other vehicles that don't have this upper lip, it's not this interesting to install, but this one's just, this specific vehicle is a little different. So you have to play with this rubber piece to get it to sit nice and tight up against the vehicle. Just so we know that we're not. Our crossbars aren't going to be moving around and that's why we're heading down the road. So we're going to make sure it's seated properly behind the seal. Also, one thing I just figured out is, I had this clamp that's actually sitting on top of one of these ridges, is causing the clamp to sit at an angle, which was also causing problems.So make sure you don't do that when you're installing it and just get it up a little snug. And we're just going to go back and forth on the other side, tightening down until we get this torque. This torque tool we do as we tighten it down and this line will actually straighten out and that tells us that we have our bolts tight enough. And with everything torqued down, we can place our covers back over our legs.Awesome, and now we are ready to install accessories to carry our kayaks or bikes or ladders, anything else down the road with our vehicle. And that's going to conclude our test fit of the Rhino-Rack Vortex Aero Crossbar system on our 2017, Nissan Titan. Thanks for watching.
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (80 Customer Reviews)
These heavy-duty, aluminum crossbars work with Rhino-Rack legs to create a sturdy roof rack. The square bars include built-in C-channels for mounting Rhino-Rack heavy-duty, contractor-grade accessories.
The rack fit well and was easy to install. Seems to be made well. The problem is the amount of road noise. I never even put the basket on. It was so loud, it roared. I repositioned it several times but the noise was way too much and I finally just removed it. I spent a lot of money for the rack and the basket and now they are in storage. I wish it would have worked out better because I thought it looked really good.
Ok… giving this item four stars as an overall view. The good: it fits a Jeep Wrangler perfectly. With the appropriate legs, it canvases across the entire roof of the Jeep with the legs attaching to the gutters. The bad: just a bit too noisy for my liking, even with the appropriate wind faring (I don’t expect absolute silence since I have a one touch sky top). The noise is not a big deal on short trips, but it was definitely driving my wife and kids nuts on a 2+ hour drive (stick some headphones on the kids, problem fixed)
In the future, I might switch it up from these square rails and go with something a bit more aerodynamic…
Scratches right out of the box. Fits good and works.
Great product sturdy bars. Keep in mind anything you install on the bars needs to have longer bolts because of how big the bars are but that's a minor detail
Ordered a Rhino Rack for my 2014 GMC Sierra 2500HD Denali. Rack arrived in very good shape and all items were there. Installing at this time and see no problems ahead.
Received quickly and everything was as described. Assembled and installed with ease. Everything functions great and the wind fairing completely killed the crossbar whistle.
I love the roof racks and use them all the time carrying ladders or building materials
Good quality and locks are included. The plastic lock covers are flimsy but they will keep an honest person honest.
I got the roof rack mounted anyways. Better pics to come when it's all finished!
These fit the truck really well!
The product is sturdy, well built and attractive. On its own, only a four. Your video installation instructions got you the 5th star, as the printed instructions from Rhino were a complete waste of paper.
This kit is easy to slap on and sturdy enough to balance my skis and snowboards. I recently used the Rhino Rack on a three hour drive to a ski resort and had no issues.
This rack has been perfect. After a year of ownership it’s still going strong!!
There was a small delay in shipping but I was contacted quickly by phone with a follow up email. Everything arrived sooner than I expected. The Rhino roof racks mounted easily and look good. Excellent customer service.
Seamless installation. The instructions were well thought out and easy to follow. A year after installation the contact points are solid as when first installed. The rack system matches the truck and gives it a great look.
This is my second Rhino-Rack. They go on very easily and hold the bikes/kayaks and even an extension ladder very well....thanks for a great product
This rack works perfectly on my Nissan Versa for carrying my two Perception Sound 9'6" kayaks. The Rhino-Racks look good to me. The kayaks can rest directly on the rubber pads on the rails, unlike the Yakama racks I had in the past that had bare pipe rails. Also, I expect I can buy parts to adapt this product to a different car without having to buy new towers. I am sorry there are not hooks or loops to attach bungees when carrying lumber. They are noisy in the wind, but less so when carrying the kayaks.
Great quality
Great product, I've never used the clamp down style before, but they are just as solid if not more so than the bolted down ones.
Fits beautifully! Easy directions. The additional instruction sheets that were specific to MY truck made this whole process stress-free.
Two items I received surprised me when I unpacked the box were the rails because they were not black like I saw in the picture, and the rubber insert that I am having a hard time sliding in the rail. Should this rubber insert have come already installed in the rail or is there a top on how to put in with ease?
Roof rack is a perfect fit on my 2021 Titan. Ski rack will be used for my surf fishing rods.
This is an excellent product. It was the only product that would fit my truck. I was able to mount it by myself, it took me longer than I thought it would, but it helps if you watch first a video on line about how to put it together. The support staff is excellent if you miss any parts. I highly recommend it for the 2015 Nissan Rogue.
Andrei
Thanks to Etrailer, I am ready to do some serious summer exploring with my 2013 Mazda 3! Rhino Racks, Malone top box, and Kuat bike rack!
Well engineered rack that fits my Ram 2500 crew cab well. A bit of wind noise at highway speeds. I have the heavy duty cross pieces with a square cross section.
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