Quick review from me:
I ordered the TrailRax rack from the
BN Gear Store during their holiday sale... and just got it install this past weekend.
The Good
- Uses a standardized mounting mechanism. You can attach anything you want with some carriage bolts and nuts. This is unlike the factory roof rack that would require adaptor brackets and/or drilling for just about anything you wanted to mount.
- Uses the full length of the vehicle.
- The rack itself is very modular. If you don't need the side PakRax for that particular trip, you can take it off. If you don't need all of the cross bars, you can take most of them off.
- Relatively quiet on the road. All roof racks introduce some level of additional wind noise, just kind of the nature of the beast. Thanks to the wind deflector, the additional noise on the TrailRax rack is minimal.
- Supports light bars. I don't intend on using a light bar personally, but the option is there if you need it.
The Bad
- My TrailRax kit was missing parts. This ended up not being a huge deal... @London and the folks at TrailRax got it sorted out, and I had the missing parts in-hand within a week. But I feel like I have to be fully transparent about it anyway.
- Both of the side rails were bent in a few spots. Not sure if it was damage from shipping or if they were shipped out that way, but nothing a mallet couldn't fix.
- The aluminum extrusions (the crossbars) were poorly cleaned up after the machining process. I had to take an air compressor to clean out all of the metal shavings to prevent any cross-threading. Again, not a huge deal, but since the rack is nearly $2000 your expectations are high.
- The entire kit uses SAE sizes for their fasteners (except for the one nut that interfaces with the Bronco). This is a personal pet peeve of mine. Doesn't it really matter? Admittedly... no, not really. But everything on the Bronco itself is metric, so it would be nice if all of the accessories on the Bronco were also metric. But in the end all it really means is I have to add on SAE sizes to my tool roll.
- It took me three days to install. Now to be completely honest, at lot of this was my ridiculous levels of stubbornness and has nothing to do with the rack itself. A lot was also because it was 28-34 degrees outside, and fingers don't work so well when they are cold. But most of all it was because I was installing this solo and had to MacGyver ways to install this without scratching/denting my Bronco. (Unfortunately my wife is only 4'11", so she is no help on these sorts of projects.) But, yes, in full transparency, it took me 3 days to install it. If you had a buddy that wasn't a midget, you could definitely do it in a day, but you should still give yourself a time budget 3-6 hours just in case.
PICTURE DUMP
Day 1: installing the PaxRak support brackets—requires removing your hard top, which is insanely difficult to do solo by the way.
One of the bent rails—kind of hard to see in the photo but obvious in person.
Day 2 - Beginning the top rack assembly.
Installing the windshield:
All of the aluminum shavings left over from the machining process:
End of day 2. Most of the rack is there, but the crossbars and PakRax hasn't been installed yet. The green shopping bags were used to prevent scratches.
Channeling my inner
@Calgecko
Start of day 3... greeting with a light dusting a snow.
