Eezi-Awn K9 Cub Tacoma Roof Rack

Video Transcript

Intro

Hi, this is Paul with Equipt Expedition Outfitters, and today I'm very excited to show you something brand new from Eezi-Awn. They have created an entirely new rack design specifically for the Toyota Tacoma double cab pickups, both in Gen 2 and Gen 3 models, and I'm very, very excited to see what they have got here. What it comes down to is a set of components that you put together when they get to your home. It comes in a box about six by six by about five feet long, so it's very easy for us to get to you by ground freight, not a problem there. What we do is we set up four pieces of channel into the pinch weld seam on your Tacoma. Those are then attached to these brackets which are front and rear brackets for the top. From those brackets, we have two side rails that hold everything together, and in those side rails, all of these holes are lined up to mount the mounting extrusion. This mounting extrusion, there are three top extrusions plus a wind fairing that go on the top of the rack system. The extrusions are incredibly strong; they have the eight-millimeter t-slot built into the top of them. What's nice about this rack is it is very modular in the fact that if three load bar or cross braces are not enough, you can add more to it clear up to a solid platform on the top of the rack. So what we're going to do today is we're going to put the first one together on our Equipt junior Tacoma double cab truck. Let's get to it.

Installation

Up on the roof of the double cab Tacoma, and what we've done is we've taken out the pinch weld trim. That's what I like to call it, and what that is is that right here is where the roof is welded to the side of the truck, and down in that channel is where they have created some mounting points in the double cap Tacoma lids, and those are six-millimeter threaded holes. Okay, and so when you take that trim off of the roof, you're going to see this piece of white foil over all of those holes. It looks nice and clean, but if you take a razor knife, you can cut the material out there to clear out those holes. So there's a couple of things I want to show to you. One, down in there you have some threaded points; those are really cool. The trick of those is that the last thing we want to do is to put a bolt in there and have that bolt seize in place. That's a terrible thing, so what I suggest you do is take a six-millimeter tap and run that tap down through that hole, make sure that there's no burrs in the threads because that's a virgin thread, there's nothing been in there, and there might be a little bit of paint or other stuff in there. Then what I do is I take one of the six-millimeter bolts that come with the system, put a little bit of anti-seize on that bolt, and take your Allen wrench and run that throw thing down in there and run it down in there, and what that's going to do is that's going to put some of that anti-seize material down in the threads on each one of those because here in a minute, what we're going to do is we're going to put some silicone over each one of those holes, we're going to put the mounting rail in place, bang, and then we're going to push the bolts down through the mounting rail through the silicone into those threads, and if we do that correctly, that should seal up the holes and also allow you to back them out at a future date because of the anti-seize. This is your mounting extrusion, okay, and if you look at that darn thing right at the end, you notice on this one, the right-hand side of that extrusion tapers up quicker than the left-hand side below the slot that we use for our mounting points. It tips up a little bit vertical, and what we found is that these extrusions are not only left and right but front and back, and the reason for that is we want to have that faster vertical climb to the inside of the roof. When we put this down over our holes, you'll see it down in there that we want that to climb quicker, and what that's going to do is allow to compensate for the curve in the roof line. It's not an up and down curve but a left to right. The front of the pinch weld trim actually curves outward on the roof, so we want to have that in the right place. Now, down in there are some holes. We've got a single hole and a slot, super deal. So what we're going to do is try to match up that hole with that front hole and use the slot for our back slot, and what we found is that not only are they left and right, but if you look at them here, the slot on this one is further back on the extrusion, and that's because the holes back there are further apart. Okay, so you want to make sure that you're getting the right extrusions in the right places. So your very quick rise on that extrusion, that side right there, right-hand side, that is to the inside of the truck, and then the longer spacing for those items you put to the back. Okay, so now the other thing you do is you notice I've got the holes in these already, but in this one here, you don't see any holes because there is foam rubber on the bottom of it. All right, so what I did is I took from the back side of this guy, I took an awl, one of these guys, and I found the hole in there, and I pushed that down through there and twirled it back and forth, and I cleared the hole because if you try to take this with the foam in place and stuff a bolt down in there, you're going to get really kind of the threads buggered up because of the foam removing itself from the back side of this extrusion here. That's the last thing you really want to do; that's not cool at all. Okay, so now let's say we've got that positioned in place there. We're going to need to cut some trim, so we have a piece of trim that goes from just under the windshield clip here, clips on here, and it's going to run in here, and you're going to have to cut it off right here, and you come back here, and you're going to need to run down there and see that other mount. So that's that piece of pinch weld trim right here. So what I plan on doing is I'm going to take this piece of pinch weld trim, and I'm going to put it right up tight there, right up nice and clean. Okay, then I'm going to go down there, and I'm going to see where I need to cut it down there and just make one cut instead of having to cut a little bit here off the back of this one and cut a little bit off the front of that one. I'm just going to make one cut on that. The interesting thing about this material is that right inside that little hole in the I-beam there, the center, there's a piece of metal in there, so what we found is it's really easy to cut this, the rubber with the razor knife, and you can take it and you can wiggle it back and forth and break it off; that's possible, or what we do is we take a Dremel with a cutting wheel and cut right through it, makes it really easy to do that. Okay, and then you're going to put that trim back in there, we're going to go down there, so what we end up having it look like is a piece of mounting wheel rail with a piece of trim butted up right to it nice and clean. Okay, so what we have sitting here now is we've got all of our mounting rail attached in place. We've got the two over there on the passenger side, we've got the driver's side rear, the driver's side front one, and what we did is we put the mounting rail in, tied it in place nice and sealed, and we cut the back trim to fit here, and we cut the back for the middle trim to fit in up to here. We're going to replace the trim up there, and it's looking nice. Our next step is to go and pre-assemble the top of the rack itself. We laid all the pieces of the top of the rack out here on a big table so that we can take a good look at what we are putting together.

Assembly

The pieces of the top of the rack are laid out here on a big table so that we can take a good look at what we are putting together. So what you'll see down here is we've got this all upside down. We have the two sides; these will be set up vertically here, one there and one on the other side. This is the front wind fairing, sets up against the assembly there, bolts into these two holes here. Okay, now what we have is we have our three slats; we have the slots upside down, so that's the smooth side down. On the other side, that's the t-slot right there; then we want that up on the top, so we're going to take this extrusion here and put it in the last set of holes right back in here, so that gives us our back. Our front is going to be this edge up here, and so what we want to do is we want to lay out our other two extrusions in that field where we want them so that we can put this rack together and give us some good rigidity and strength. So we're going to put that together and we'll take a look at it then. We've got the trim all back in place, and we've put the feet in place up here on the top, and all of these feet are pretty much specific to the locations. If you notice on the back here, what we've done is we made sure that this is vertical on here. This is the bigger foot, and it's for the back, and it has a lot of slide outward this way because the pinch weld trim on the Tacoma gets narrower between the well, the trim at the back of the roof line, so it needs to have more lateral adjustment outward to catch the platform on top. Okay, now the smaller feet are up on the front. We've got them set up so that if you look at it here, we're trying to leave this piece so that it's parallel to the rear and holds into that position, so it'll have a little bit more space here. I think it'll make a lot more sense once you have the pieces in hand to take a look at that, but from here, what we're going to do is we're going to put the platform, which is right there, we're going to put that up on the four feet up here and see how it looks.