Eezi-Awn K9 Spine Tacoma Roof Rack

Video Transcript

Hi, this is Paul with Equipt. I just want to show you a new rack system that we're putting together here for the Toyota Gen 3 Tacoma. This is the double cab that has the factory mounting points underneath the mounting rail here, right up under this mounting rail right here. There are some mounting points here and back in the back there, and we are going to attach a new style of groove rack. It's the K-9 roof rack. Still, the platforms are the same, but we're using something that we're now calling the spine. We will be cutting the trim in the back, adding these spacers right here, and then this spine will mount on top of it. On top of that spine, we are putting a 1250 wide by 1400 long, which is 50 inches wide and 55 inches long, platform on the top of it. So let's get busy.

The first thing we did is we pulled up this piece of trim out of the pinch weld here. On the back of that trim, you see there's a little extra piece of material there, and that slides underneath this piece of trim here. So when you get your fingers under there and pull it forward a little bit, this pops out. Down at this end, there's a piece of foam adhesive tape that is stuck on there, and I just used a small flat blade screwdriver to pry it away from the top of the pinch weld trim here. At the front, there is a nifty little clip right there. It's in that clip that goes on the back of that piece of trim right there, and we'll get into that a little bit more.

What you find is when you get under there, there are these pieces of foil tape that have been put on and then painted over. Underneath those, you can push your finger in there and feel there are two mounting holes there. There's one here in the center that we're not gonna be using, so we're gonna leave that one right alone. In fact, you can see the recess of that hole underneath there, so we're gonna leave that one alone. What I've done up here in the front is I took an awl and went right down in that hole and cleared it. Notice I didn't pull the tape off; we're gonna leave the tape there. That's still a good weatherproof thing to have in place. What I did is I pointed an awl down in there, and now you can see that there are threaded holes down in there.

Our next thing is to deal with those holes, and I'm just going to leave that material all there. We're gonna take this spacer that the DeeZee on has developed, lay that over the top here, put some silicone on the top of those holes, lay this in place, and then put the spine on top of it. We'll bolt it all down through there and make sure that all of that is sealed into place here. One thing that I do on all of our stainless steel hardware when we're doing installations on any vehicle, regardless of type, is that I get some stuff here called anti-seize. Stainless steel has been known to burrow up pretty quickly, and over time it will set itself in its ways there, making it tough to get out. So what I do before we put any silicone caulking down or anything like that is put a little bit of this anti-seize on here and push it down in there. I just verify that the threads are gonna be okay, and then I take that bolt and run it down in there.

Now, what's that doing is, now that I have that anti-seize on that bolt as I'm running it into the threads, it means that the threads inside there are getting the anti-seize on them as well. So now I get it clear down in there, way past where it's going to go, and then back it out. Now I know that when I put this bolt down through the spine and the spacer and through the silicone caulking, the threads inside that are going to have some of that stuff already down in there. So I don't have to worry about getting that through that silicone caulking and maintaining it on the threads. It's already been done on the roof of the Tacoma as well as for runners or 200 and many of the other vehicles. The only place for water to ingress the roof, well, other than through the thing over there, is through these threaded mounting points.

So what we do is we put some silicone on there, and I just swirl it like a soft-serve ice cream up there, a little Hershey's kiss on top of both of those threaded mounting points there. You can see that I've already done that down here, and I've set the spacer over the top of it. Now what we're gonna do is we're going to take our spine, lay that over the top of it, and then take our hardware here with the washers on it. We're gonna feed that down through that stuff and tighten it into place. That's gonna give us a nice solid dry fit on the top of the roof.

What we've done now is we've taken this and we've put the spine up there. If you take a look back there, you'll see that we have the two bolts, the stainless steel bolts, put in there. Underneath, we have our spacer, and on top is that tab. What's nice is that Easy On built these slots here for us in both the front and the back for access to the Allen bolts, the button head cap screws that are in there. That gives us a chance to tighten them down in there. Also, the spacers are the same length as our top here, so you want to move that spacer back and forth in there until it's the same width so that it's a nice clean line right there for us to cut our trim and put the trim back in here. So I'm going to tighten these in place and go to the next step.

Now we have the spine mounted up there nice and tight, so our next piece of work here is to work on putting the trim back in. What I did is I laid the trim down here. You can see where I've got this lined up back here. This goes underneath and is lined up there. I come up here and put a pencil mark right there, then came up forward and put another pencil mark right here, which is right against where this thing is right here.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna remove this piece now. What you do is take a razor knife, follow that edge, score it, and cut it through a few times. Turn it over, do the same thing, square back and forth. Now in the middle of this piece of material, there's a small piece of metal, so you're gonna score it a few times, and then you're going to take it and twist it back and forth, and it'll snap off to that length right there. We put the piece in. What we've done now is we've cut this piece in, cut it here, cut a space out here, and put this piece in down. We cut a spot there and a spot there.

Now, what I like to do is cut each one of them individually. If you mark every one of them and cut every one of them, what if you're wrong? What if something went wrong? So what I do is I start with that one back there, mark it, cut it, and fit it. Then I take a piece out here, mark where it should be, cut that, then line that up and make sure that my measurement comes down here and hooks onto here is accurate. I cut that, then go forward here, start here, and move back the pencil sketch and cut it. Make each one of them individually, and that way it'll be a lot more precise as you put them in there. But it's a simple matter of scoring it with a razor knife, bending it back and forward, and there you go.

The final steps of putting our K-9 rack together with the new spine mounting system is to attach the K-9 platform. If you notice under here, the spine has holes in the tab in three locations: one, two, and three down there. Under here on the bottom of the K-9 platform, in here is a T-slot in the cross brace for an 8-millimeter bolt, and you can see in there that we have attached those in the locations on this side here. We've got the two up inside that location and the two up inside that location. So that gives us a side profile that's very nice, very tight, and very clean. From the front, it looks pretty impressive as well. If we get up on the step here, you can see we now have a 50 by 55-inch rock-solid rack, the K-9 rack for the double cab Tacoma using the spine mounting system. Looks great. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. We're at equipt1.com. This is Paul. I appreciate your time. Thanks.