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This custom fit kit lets you mount 4 Rhino-Rack 2500 legs to your vehicle with fixed mounting points. Legs mount to vehicle with attachment studs. Includes 4 pads and 4 attachment studs.
Features:
Specs:
Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Hey everyone, Charles here at etrailer. And today we're taking a look at the Rhino-Rack Vortex Aero series crossbars with the custom DK fit kit and a 2500 series roof rack legs on our 2015 Mazda CX-5. These cross bars are gonna be a great way of carrying extra gear to and from your destinations and freeing up space in your vehicle. You can carry up to 165 pounds, just make sure you don't exceed that of the crossbars or the weight of your roof. So we have this aerodynamic shape that's gonna improve your drag as well as the vortex Aero strips. They are also gonna reduce drag and wind noise as well.
And with those straps or the strips on the bottom as well where you slide in your legs, it comes included with a plastic lock core on each tower. And these plastic end caps with a lock. All the end caps will be keyed alike, and then all these will be keyed alike as well. So it'll just be two keys and you can also get metal locking cores here at etrailer, just for a better peace of mind. So mounting these at the two closest points where we could, we are going to have a spread of about 42 and a half inches.
The overhang for the rear is gonna be about two and a half inches from the end of the crossbar and not the end cap and in the front, about an inch overhang and the distance from the roof to the bottom of the crossbars in the front's gonna be a little under three and a half and to the top, about four and a half inches. And for the rear crossbars to the bottom of the crossbar, it's about three inches. And then to the top, about four and a quarter inches. And let's go ahead and show you how to install it. Beginning of the installation, I unpackaged everything and set them in their separate groups.
One thing to note for the fit kit here is that they're all gonna be the same number, the M 473 but you're gonna have two twos and two ones. The twos are gonna be for the rear crossbar and the ones are gonna be for the front but you're just gonna take that and snap them into place and make sure you keep the twos together and the ones together, separate from each other. From there, we're gonna go ahead and open the tower like that. And then for our fit kit and our vehicle here, we don't need these two middle parts that it comes with. We're gonna replace those.
So after you wanna unscrew it, little technique I found to make it easier at popping this guy out 'cause it's a little stuck is just use that bolt and push it up and you can just throw these away. Or if you want to keep 'em, you can keep 'em. So over here, these we're in separate bags and so you just want to take one of the screws, this lock washer and then this washer, set that off to the side for now. And then this piece with the curve at top and facing out, we're gonna place it in the back of the tower. Just like that. I'm gonna hold it with my finger so it doesn't fall out. And then taking this piece, I'm gonna insert it into the slot, above the piece that we're holding with our finger from there. Now I'm gonna hold this piece, flip it over and then I can screw in this bolt right here. Set this off to the side and do this for all three towers. That's how it should look. Once all four towers are completed, we can go ahead and just pry our trim pieces off at both sides. What we did is we just took the whole thing off and there are two placements where we can add these screws in. We chose the two closest points and we're just gonna screw the screws in there. And then once we have that, we placed the trim piece on top of that, gave it a little smack and it made an indent so that we drilled right in there, placed it right over the top and just clicked it back in place. Once you removed all the strips from the inside of your crossbars, go ahead and pre-install this. For me, it just makes it easier to just kind of massage them in there. And then for the numbered strips, we are gonna take a look at the instructions I found for our Mazda CX-5. For the front crossbars, I trimmed it to 191 millimeters because we have the Vortex Aero crossbars. For the rear, we trimmed them down to 163 millimeters. And that's what we did right here. Just chopped it right at 163 and slid this in there. And that is going to give us the space we need. So now we can just slide the tower on it. And we know that this is the distance we need to hit those two points on our vehicle. With the leftover insert here, you can go ahead and fill up that gap to reduce any wind noise or drag as well. And then we can cut off the excess right there. Once you have your strips and everything in place, we can go ahead and tighten these down with the included tool. And don't forget to attach your feet. You want the arrow pointing out and these two parts attached to these two bars right here, snaps into place. Now we can go ahead and throw these on our roof. And so whenever we're all lined up, we can go ahead and hand tighten this to reduce any slack and then we'll use the included tool to finish tightening it down. And we're just gonna do the same thing on other side. After you've tightened them down, give it the old shake test. And if the whole vehicle's moving, then you know you're secure. Once everything's secure, we can go ahead and put our caps on and lock them. There we go. And that'll do it for the installation. So overall, Rhino-Rack makes a great product. I like the aerodynamic shape and the Vortex Aero strip bars. If you want, you can get a little bit bigger crossbars or longer I mean, just so that you can have a little bit more overhang so that you can clamp more accessories on the end and still use the rest of your rack as well. But other than that, these are great. And that's gonna do it for our look on the Rhino-Rack Vortex Aero series crossbars on our 2015 Mazda CX-5..
Average Customer Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (3472 Customer Reviews)
This custom fit kit lets you mount 4 Rhino-Rack 2500 legs to your vehicle with fixed mounting points. Legs mount to vehicle with attachment studs. Includes 4 pads and 4 attachment studs.Pretty nice rack system. Held up to my 90lb canoe no problem. However a piece did fly off on the highway and the "locking" bar end cap can pull off super easy.
The directions were ok. There is some stuff you have to kind of figure out for yourself, mainly the roof trim. I plan to leave the rack on so I drilled theough the trim
Fairly easy installation. Read the instructions thoroughly before hand and get familiar with the parts. Take care when installing mounting studs onto car itself so as not to strip or cross thread them. Once installed they look great.
It works, yet for the price I expected more precision manufacturing than what I got. Several screw threads had rough spots and there is no way to tighten the nut on the underside of the metal bracket on one leg. It would have been nice for the instructions to mention the wrench for that nut is a 10 mm. And whatever made the designers think the regular user would have the type of torque wrench they require?
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!
Love it, fast shipping, works great and it looks awesome on my car :)
Jp
7/31/2022
After a year, the rack is still in very top shape, easy to remove for the winter since I use is only for Kayaks in the summer, easy reinstall. One thing that barely need to be mentioned, some the noise is created on the side tips when driving moderately *cough* *cough*, but it is to be expected since it doesnt serve for aerodynamic :
Easy to put together and it it has a quality feel
Overall , great fit and quality, I ran into noise issues under the vortex rails , however, I cut the measuring guide that is supplied .and cut them to fit into the bottom of the rails . No more noise !!
The rack worked great this summer! I'm not sure the hardware for mounting it to the roof is going to hold up though. The little wrench is slipping in two of the screws and two of the pieces that mount directly to the roof have bent. Can I buy individual hardware?
Can't wait to use it for rooftoping my kayak
I installed using the fixed mount on our 2016 Mazda CX-5. Install, while a bit lengthy, was fairly straightforward when you follow the directions. Solid roof rack that is good for strapping items down, including kayaks/canoe.
Note of caution for 2016 Mazda CX-5 owners! If using fixed mount with a moonroof, the placement is directly over moonroof. It whistles too. Enough to want to keep the moonroof shut.
Again, if using fixed mount on 2016 Mazda CX-5, the space between bars is TOO WIDE for any standard cargo box. Literally nothing out there that will fit. I learned the hard way.
Very nice produce give props to the designer well build nice costume fit to my car easy too install even make the vehicle looks good and thank you to Melissa A at etrailer.com really helpful and awesome ty ten stars.
I bought this rack for affordability and the fact that it was taller than the antenna fin on the roof. My SUP board fits perfectly up there without needing expensive add on accessories.
The racks were easy to install and look really great.
Shelley
8/29/2019
Its great and was one of the best purchases for my vehicle. I would recommend this to everyone over expensive factory rails and racks.
It took me a little while to install because the size numbers for my vehicle were off. But that being said, fast deliver and all the CORRECT parts for my particular vehicle made it a reasonably easy installation. I would order from e-trailer again.
I received THREE different sets of instructions for the 2500, plus the PDF I was prompted to download...REALLY confusing. I have put together all kinds of furniture, including a 3' x 6' armoire (I am a 5' tall woman), installed paneling and flooring, including carpet in my van, installed bathroom tiles, built closet storage 'out of my head' and from plans, pulled and installed a car radiator/brake and clutch pedals assembly/starter assembly during the course of my 56 years on this earth...but I have never, never, never had such a difficult time making sense of 'too much information'...please go over the instructions and combine what needs to be combined and separate the info for the different vehicles!!!
I am pleased with the outcome as far as the overall sturdiness of the product and I look forward to making use of this system. Besides the assembly instruction difficulties, I am disappointed in the fact that I bought the lock sets for each crossbar, only to see that the insides of each of the legs is exposed... ??? Please consider that in future design 'tweaks'.
We love our Rhino Racks! We got them to haul our kayaks around on our crossovers. These were our first racks we've ever installed to a vehicle so we struggled a little bit to figure them out, but once we did figure it out, it was super easy.
Mostly importantly, we initially ordered the wrong rack in error. etrailer was helpful and accommodating and made the return process super easy and helped us get the right product ordered. I would definitely recommend this company and these roof racks.
Bought this kit for my 2018 Mitsubishi Outlander Sport. The only reason it didn't get 5 stars was because the install instructions weren't clear. To be fair, I should have measured the fixed points on my car on my own rather than relying on the provided spreadsheets. It only took me between 5-10 minutes to make the neccessary adjustments as I was mounting the crossbars and was a pretty easy fix to make. Just frustrating in the heat. Also, when tightening the mounts to my car, I wasn't aware a wrench would be needed and didn't have any available. Had to buy a set, and none of them fit properly (bought in inches, should have gone metric I suppose?)
Other than that, great product. Bought a kayak mount to put on and held it well for a 500+ mile trip. 9/10 would reccomend.
I called etrailer with some very technical questions on fitment to my 2012 Mazda3. I spoke with Janeth, who worked hard to find answers and ultimately referred me to RHINO RACK to find out the size of the wrench needed.
The Mazda has fixed mounting points and a little stubby wrench must be used to tighten it to the studs on the roof. I wanted to use a ball ended allen key at at angle to save time installing and removing the rack regularly. A 10 mm ball end allen works perfectly with final tightening with the OEM wrench. A ratchet with 10mm allen socket or a flex shaft might also work.
The roof rack mounted easily and rigidly after glancing through the instructions. I got 3" longer crossbars than specced so the mounting charts weren't useful. I mounted the towers with the crossbars loose and tightened them afterward.
Thank you Janeth! You were really helpful.
Thank you for the follow up. The rhino roof rack system I bought for my Mazda have been great. I have enjoyed hauling my kayaks and has made transportation easy.
ORDERED THE RHINO 2500 FOR MY 2011 MAZDA 3. ORDER WAS PLACED ON MONDAY AND ARRIVED THURSDAY. TOOK AN HOUR AND A CIGAR TO GET MY BEARINGS. THE DIRECTIONS COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER BECAUSE I ORDERED THE KIT FOR FIXED ROOF POINTS. MINOR ADJUSTMENTS WERE MADE AND ALL CAME TOGETHER. IWOULD ONLY CHANGE ONE PART, THE MOUNTING BOLT THAT ATTACHES THROUGH THE BASE TO THE ROOF SCREW WOULD BE BETTER IF THE SLEEVE USED FOR THE WRENCH WAS CAST METAL.
OVERALL I AM PLEASED AND AM LOOKING FOWARD TO PUTTING MY KAYAK ON THE ROOF WHILE SAVING WHATS LEFT OF MY PAINT JOB. IWOULD RECOMMEND THIS PRODUCT TO ANYONE.
ORDERED THE RHINO 2500 FOR MY 2011 MAZDA 3. ORDER WAS PLACED ON MONDAY AND ARRIVED THURSDAY. TOOK AN HOUR AND A CIGAR TO GET MY BERINGS. THE DIRECTIONS COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER BECAUSE I ORDERED THE KIT FOR FIXED ROOF POINTS. MINOR ADJUSTMENTS WERE MADE AN ALL CAME TOGETHER. IWOULD ONMLY CHANGE ONE PART, THE MOUNTING BOLT THAT ATTACHES THROUGH THE BASE TO THE ROOF SCREW WOULD BE BETTER IF THE SLEEVE USED FOR THE WRENCH WAS CAST METAL.
OVERALL I AM PLEASED AND AM LOOKING FOWARD TO PUTTING MY KAYAK ON THE ROOF WHILE SAVING WHATS LEFT OF MY PAINT JOB. IWOULD RECOMMEND THIS PRODUCT TO ANYONE.
The installation intructions provided were printed in low resolution so they were somewhat difficult to follow. Good thing for smart phones and pulling up the instructions from the interwebs! I haven't had the chance to test out the rack too much it feels solid. 4+ Stars
Put roof racks on today- a perfect fit! Best to use parts while ready directions to fully understand where they go before permanent installation.
After owning for a year this product works like its brand new. I haven’t had one issue with it. Extremely sturdy and definitely well built. If your in the market for a rack, I wouldn’t go with anything else. Yes, it’s a little pricey but it’s 100% worth every penny.
Easy installation, specially when you read through the instructions first before starting. Only concern I have is that I may not have gotten a couple of the mounting legs tight enough, but I will just have to get a torque wrench (not something I have in my home tool inventory) and recheck all the mounting hardware. Love the look and noise is minimal. Great product, reasonable and fast 2nd day shipping. I strongly recommend to anyone needing extra space for trips.
Made installation easy
Erik
12/2/2018
My rack works great! Use it for my 12 fishing kayak. Installing it was easy and looks great! Would definitely recommend!
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Robert
10/14/2022
Fantastic! Very little noise on highway and sturdy.