I am heading in the direction of mounting Yakima bars on my V2 camper and would like to make sure I’m not missing anything. I already have a pair of 58 inch bars and a bunch of accessories, thus sticking with Yakima. GFC recently stopped making their bar adapters, so I started looking for other options.
Thule makes these 542 artificial rain gutters. $75 for a four pack
Reading various reviews, folks say that you can use these with either Thule or Yakima rain gutter towers.
Yakima still makes these 1a rain gutter towers. $219 for a four pack. They seem out of stock everywhere, but I have some ordered.
Using these bolts and washers from McMaster-Carr
18-8 Stainless Steel Button Head Hex Drive Screws, Black Oxide, ¼”-20x0.5 inch
Black-Oxide 18-8 Stainless Steel Washer for 1/4" Screw Size, 0.281" ID, 0.625" OD
And the ¼ inch track nuts from Gizla
The artificial rain gutter has a rubber gasket which goes between the metal plate and the mounting surface. The only modification I made was to enlarge the bolt holes in the rubber gasket so the neck of the track nut can fit through. This works out well as the rubber thickness seems to be greater than the amount the track nut’s neck protrudes past the T-slot. So you end up with everything tight and flush.
Assuming you are using 58” bars, the total cost for each mounted crossbar, not including hardware, is about $205.
See photos trying out some mounting locations. I will post again once I have the towers. This seems like a reasonable approach to me, but would like to hear any feedback.
The Yakima mounts were backordered for many months. I received them recently, but haven’t had a chance to try them out yet. I will try to do it soon and post the results.
Has anyone been able to successfully pull this off? I tried to mount my today and it appears the towers were not designed to mount to a vertical gutter. This makes sense as most vehicles and toppers have some inward slope to them. I think I’m going to try to heat up the artificial gutters and try to bend out the bottom portion in an attempt to make all this work. Curious if anyone else has been down this road already??
Cheers
yes, whole system was existing except for brackets and towers. with 58" bars there is about 3.5" overlap each side so you could probably reduce width to the next smallest and get by but this amount of overlap is kind of nice as a hand hold to jump up and stand on rear tire…
I have the Thule artificial rain gutters and towers now currently on my old Snugtop shell. After reading this it looks like they will work very similar to the Yakima’s on my new GFC. If anybody is using this setup please let me know!
