Prodiver

I kept scratching the hardtop mounting my kayak on top of the jeep, using a foam covered nylon strap was not working. So I decided to install a roof rack system.
http://my.project-jk.com/showphoto.php?photo=46849

Thumper616

Looks good. Is that the Yakima ShowBoat? Yeah, I wish I had a hardtop to use the raingutter bar mounts. I had a full Yakima rack with bars, saddles, and two sets of BowDown's on my old SUV that I traded in for the Jeep. Haven't found a setup that I like yet for the soft top. So, I just run everything off of my Nissan Armada which is a pain since it's tall.

My kayaks are almost collecting dust hanging in my garage since I got my Jeep. I need to find a solution.

Prodiver

Thumper616,

Thanks for your comment. You are correct the roll/bar is called the "Showboat" by Yakima. The hardtop is tall so I had to come up with something to assist with loading a 12' Ocean Kayak on top of the Jeep and he "Showboat was the answer. It works great!

Mike

Thumper616

I have two 13' Neckys that I have to pick up over my head and step up onto a small foot ladder to get them into the Yakima BowDown's on top of my Armada. It's a back injury waiting to happen. It's a bigger pain getting them down.

I need to put a base rack on my Jeep, but the one's I've seen (Garvin, KargoMaster, and Wild Boar) are good, but each has something that I don't like and wouldn't want on my Jeep. The Wild Boar is the closest, but I'm not going to drill into the body of the Jeep just for a roof rack.

Thumper616

Camp, if you mean it would work great at providing attachment points to tiedown the kayak, I agree. But you could just tie it down to the roll bars with the soft top down if that's what you were going for.

Your Cargo Nack is a super cool product, but it's not a substitute for a soft top, not in Florida where you're never 15 minutes from the next possible downpour.

Thumper616

My problem is I don't have a hard top - only a soft top. So right now my only option is to use the big frame racks like the KargoMaster Congo Cage, the Garvin, the Wild Boar, or the Gobi racks. But those make it a pain to raise and lower the soft top, which is one of the main reasons for having a Jeep in the first place.

Ideally, there would be something that could go OVER the soft top without damaging it that you could remove when not in use, but that's probably not possible. There's nothing to grab onto up there.

Thumper616

Yeah, I've thought about it. But I could buy a brand new Freedom Top for what a trailer costs. Yakima makes one that's made for kayaks but it's over $2K. I also thought about buying a cheap utility trailer and adding crossbars but I don't have any equipment or skills to fab anything.

Thumper616

Yeah, I've seen the Lange rack. I haven't heard good reviews about it. I know there are some issues getting it to work with an oversized spare. And as you can tell from the picture, that's a pretty long span which wouldn't work very well with Yakima/Thule attachments. Warrior Products has a nice cage rack also that lets you open the soft top without having to move anything. But, it's also one that requires drilling into the body near the rear fender and that's something I'm not going to do. If they would only design their rear attachments to connect to the frame down at the rear bumper like KargoMaster and Garvin I'd buy it.

robin

I think it looks pretty good!!!

ronjenx

Nothing personal, and not to non-constructively critisize....

Having a rack attached to the removable portion of the hard top is a very bad idea. Looking at the rack on yours, the situation is compounded by the way the load will cause a constant lifting of the removable panel as the rear bar, over the rear door, acts as a fulcrum. Even if loaded forward, the wind load, and bumping around, will act to degrade the panels' attachment to the Jeep.
The plastic gutter on the main portion of the top doesn't look all that strong, either.

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