Eezi-Awn K9 Tacoma Habitat Rack

Video Transcript

Well, the start of our installation here is we take this piece of pin, what they call pinch weld to trim, and we take that pinch weld to trim and lift it up out of place. The reason why they call it pinch weld is because that location right there is where they weld the side of the truck to the top of the truck, and you'll see there's a lot of welding points across here. Then they put in this piece of trim over the top of it to cover it all up. If you take that trim out, tip it upside down, and just leave it right next to it here, see there's a piece of foil tape right in there. Now, underneath that tape, there's going to be some holes underneath there. I'm going to take my awl and find those holes for you. Okay, there's each of the holes. Then we'll come back and clear that out on each one of those locations. But what we're going to want to do is transfer the measurements from the holes onto our trim so that we can see where we need to cut this trim. What we're gonna be doing is putting a spacer on top of this area here underneath this trim to provide the proper support and then mount the rack on top of the trim, and you'll never notice that it ever happened. So that's what we're gonna do next is mark this trim and go from there, and we'll show you what's next on that.

Now we've taken that pinch weld trim off of the vehicle, and we've gone up on there, and we can see down here I marked with a sharpie or the center of each of the holes we're going through the weld or through the pinch weld trim, and we've got two up front and one at each of the center locations back here. So what we're gonna do is we need to measure out a half inch in each direction of that mark. That gives us a one-inch area to put a spacer in here, so we're gonna cut this material out in each of the locations to receive that spacer in there. What we're using for that is just a portable Dremel tool with a cutting wheel and a razor knife that will go through this. Now, what's going on inside here is down inside there, there's a piece of metal trim that needs to be cut, and that's why we're using the Dremel wheel is to cut through that very thin piece of metal that's in there. I think you could do it with a hacksaw or a Dremel, or we're gonna even try a hole saw here and see if that works out, but the Dremel tools work for us in the past, so we're gonna clear that material out, and I'll show you what that looks like here in just a minute.

Now that we have the material removed from each of these locations here underneath the spacers, let me clear that space throughout that, and now that spacer's gonna sit in there flush across the top of there. But you'll notice what we did is we transferred the marks that we had on the bottom of the material to the top, and we made some centering marks. You know what we're gonna do is we're going to take the Dremel with a little router bit on it, and we're gonna make a hole big enough for that bolt to go through that material through the spacers and down into the roof of the truck. So what we did is we plunged some holes down through the material here with our nifty little routing tool, and you can see that they're bigger than the bolt hole itself, and what we're trying to do is give a little bit of space in there so that we have some variance on moving the bolt around to go through here. I'm not too worried about the size of this hole because what we're gonna have is a piece of mounting rail over the top of this, and underneath we're gonna have a spacer and a lot of silicone that's gonna go over the threaded mounting points in the roof. So we are now good to go with some dry fit of these pieces of trim back in place.

So we might, we did a dry fit on this, and what we found is that our back hole is just right, goes right down through, and is very easy and clean. Our front holes are a little bit forward of where we need them to be, so we can see our little threaded or the spacers here down into the threaded holes here, right? We laid that down on there, and the holes here are just a little bit forward, so we're gonna take a little bit of more material out of those two holes pushing back that way just a little bit so that when the bolt goes down in there, it fits nice and vertical and not off to an angle. We've test-fitted all the bolts, and we've got them all in place. We put the mounting rail and test-fitted it, and so now what we've done is over the top of the threaded mounting points, we have put about a Hershey's kiss worth of silicone over each one of those, and the reason why we do that is that these mounting points are the only places in this roof that there could be any water ingress at all, and so what we wanted to do is to make sure that those are sealed up tight. So what we do is you take our spacer that we made room for in the bottom of the pinch valve trim and we set it right down into the silicone, so now we've got a puddle of silicone inside there that we can push our bolt through when we put all the pieces in place. I'll settle that one right down in there as well, and that'll be the foundation for us putting the trim back onto the roof.

It's like that now, have successfully mounted the mounting rail on the top of the roof. You notice the mounting rail sits right up on the top of the fence well trim. We have the two mounting points on the top here, looks like a factory job. It goes back here and this one on both sides. Next step is to assemble the feet on the rack and put the platform on top. So one of the things that we have on this canine, in fact, we've flipped it upside down so that we can show you what we're doing here. You can see that we have two cross braces that run the length of the bottom of the platform. That's what we attach our feet to, and right out on the front of this, underneath the rack, is as what Equipt has done is they've routed out some holes in each one of these pieces here so that we can use that as a tease. You put an 8-millimeter bolt in there.

Now there's a wind deflector, which is this piece here. We wanted is in essence a 90-degree angle with two bends in it here, and the goal for this is to mount to the bottom of the rack system and distort the air that's going underneath the rack. Now the instructions that Equipt give have the platform mounting on top of the rack like so with the bend at the back of the rack system. My preference is to invert it 90 degrees and put it on here this way so that the band is at the front and then I slide it right to the front. There is not a wrong way to do this; either way is the right way, whatever you think looks best. I like it this direction.

Now what we do here in our shop is each one of the canine feet come in two pieces. There is a bottom piece here, this guy here, and that mounts inside the mounting rail that we just put up on the truck. The top part of the foot mounts to the bottom of the roof rack. This slides in here and then slides back and forth on here. What we prefer to do with these items is to actually separate the top and the bottom here now and take this top piece and pre-assemble it on the bottom of the platform. We turn it upside down, put the bolts in there, get it in here, and then tighten the bolts down just so it can barely slide back and forth. That's going to help us when we invert the rack and put it on the top of the vehicle. We're not trying to put our hands under here and do a lot of wrenching for a long time. That's gonna take a lot of time. It's a lot easier while it's open and available upside down on the owner little platform here. So that's our next step is to put all these on that guy.

You can see that we have the four tops of the feet mounted inside here, and we've tightened these nuts down just so this thing can scoot it back and forth to match the width of the truck. If you notice, that foot there is a whole lot shorter than that foot. The front feet are the taller feet. The system comes with two short light feet and two long feet. The long feet go, or the tall feet, I guess is what we call the tall feet, go to the front because of the arc of the roofline. The short feet go to the back. That keeps it nice and low profile. So if you notice this, we've got this long guy here, and we got the short guy here. We invert that, and what that matches up to is the short bottom at the back and the tall bottom at the front. Next step, put the platform on.

Okay, so now what we've done is we put the platform up on the top of those mounting feet bottom. Remember here, we had these on the bottom of the platform, and these we slid in from the back from here and slid that first one down right to where that bend is there and the second one in here. You had the tall at the front, short at the back, and what we did is we run up here and how to measure those into place as we measured off of here to the center of this cross brace and from roughly here to the second cross brace foot on each side. We brought the platform in, set it on the top of here, and adjust at the bottom of the feet the inward towards each other.

Now what we do when we mount this up here is we take its tape measure and we measure from here the back face of the foot to the edge, and we do that on both this side and the other side over there because we want to make sure that the rack is even on the top of the roof, and we do the same. We equal the measurement from here to here on this side as the same as over there, so you adjust the back in the rack this direction. At that point, we tighten these nuts up in here, and what that does is that secures the foot to the platform itself.

Next thing is we look back here, we've got an inch and 3/4 from here to here, an inch and 3/4. That gives us some good room. It's not said fast, so you have to do that width, but we like that location. It gives us a little bit of space. Okay, so now what we can do is we tighten these little guys down into the mounting rail, and what that does is that elevates the bottom of the foot to catch onto the mounting rail, keeps it from moving back and forth. We also took the look at the lines down the side of this camper here right here, and we want to make sure that those lines on that on the rack are parallel with the rest of the rack. What that means is this piece has pushed up as high as it'll go upwards, and the front foot goes down as low as it can, and that makes it so it's parallel to the lines on the habitat itself. Once you've got that in place, then you go around and you tighten these bolts here.

Now what we've done is if you look at it, the rack is in position. This is what it would look like on the top of your double cab, which in three two coma, it's 28 by 55. It sets up on there very nice, and if you look at it from the front, you've got a nice solid mounting surface for a lot of extra gear. Oh, I hope this is of interest to you. Thanks for watching.