Eezi-Awn Roof Top Tent Mounts

Video Transcript

Intro

Hi, this is Paul with Equipt Expedition Outfitters, and today I want to take a couple of minutes to talk to you about the best solutions for mounting an Eezi-Awn rooftop tent. By the way, these are solutions for mounting just about any tent out there on the market. Eezi-Awn was one of the first to come out with rooftop tents, and they developed a mounting system that has provided the solution for most of the ones on the market since.

So let's talk about, first of all, the mounting solution that's on the bottom of the tent that we start with.

Mounting Solution

Now, what it is, is it's designed as an extrusion that has a design similar to a C-shape. In this C-shape, there is a slot on each side of the extrusion. What that slot is designed to do is to take this aluminum extrusion and slide it into those slots to hold it in place. Now, what this extrusion does, it's very ingenious. It allows us to take an eight-millimeter bolt, slide it through a hole in the extrusion, and captivate the head of that bolt. Now we have a vertical mounting solution with threads pointing downward that we can slide anywhere on the extrusion mounted on the bottom of your rooftop tent, whether it's laterally left to right or forward and back on the tent.

Most of the hard shell rooftop tents out there have either two or four extrusions that run front to back on the tent. The soft shell tents, like we have here on this vehicle, have extrusions that go across left to right in the front and back, and then from front to back on each side. So you have a myriad of solutions to mount that tent down depending on the application of what you're trying to do.

Okay, so now how do we go from this to what you have on your vehicle? That's the key component. How do we adapt from this? Eezi-Awn provides a set of four sets of mounting hardware called a DIY kit. It's four extrusions, four bolts, four flat washers, four nyloc nuts, and then from there, what you want to do is up to you. The reason why they went with that instead of going with a clamp or other opportunities is because we're not exactly sure what you're going to mount to. It could be the top of a trailer lid, or it could be the top of a trailer itself, or on a platform on a vehicle or a roof rack or load bars, what have you. So they leave that up to you to decide what to do, and then you can provide the application piece as necessary.

Now, from there, we have a few different choices. What I'm going to show you are the options that Eezi-Awn has come up with to work with their K9 roof rack systems and their K9 load bar systems.

Low Profile Mount

The first one is called a low profile tent mount. Pretty simple. What it is, is it's a set of three-quarter diameter aluminum tubing with a hole drilled in it. On one side of that tubing, they have put a rubber surface and powder coated it with some nice end caps on there. What this is designed to do is to go on an Eezi-Awn K9 rack where there are spaces between the slats. You slide this into the bottom of the tent where you want it, take this piece of tubing rubber side up, slide the bolt down through there in between the slats, turn it 90 degrees, and tighten that up. What you end up with is a slat on each side with this mount in there pulling down on here, and this compresses the roof rack itself between this piece of tubing and the extrusion on the bottom of the tent. This holds the tent right down to the flat surface of the roof rack, provides great stability across there, and also makes sure that it doesn't move back and forth. The third thing it does really well is it makes it easy to get off. All you have to do is loosen the nut here, turn this parallel to the slats, and lift the tent off of the roof rack. It's our most popular mount and it works great. This can also work on other flat style roof racks for most rooftop tents that are out there on the market.

Awesome. Okay, so that's an option. What if you don't have access underneath the tent or the rack system to do that, or you have an application where you need to elevate the tent a little bit because of awning applications and the awning mounting rods to hold your raid fly in place? Whatever that application might be, you might need to elevate it a little bit. We have an aptly pro elevated mount or what we call a top hat mount.

Top Hat Mount

So what this mount does, if you take a look at it, we have some holes. We have a hole on each side at the lower elevation and one at the higher elevation. What this is designed to do is to allow you to take this mount and mount it to the T-slots in your roof rack, your flat rack system, K9 or others. Mount it this way, mount it this way, whatever way makes sense. Put your tent down on here with your extrusions going this way, slide that in there, and use a shorter bolt, of course, and tighten your tent down here. That makes it very easy for access to the top of these under the tent for tightening. Typically between the slats, we're tightening here, but you could also put it on top of a slat and still have access to it in there. It's a nice application, very sound, very solid, works wonderfully.

We have one more application that we use typically for a hard shell rooftop tent application, and that is what we're calling a flush mount.

Flush Mount

Now, a flush mount mounting system, what this is designed to do is actually go the other way. What this is designed to do is to mount to the bottom of a hard shell tent. You mount these, you can see on this bracket, it comes down here and then has a hard shape turn off here and then goes down and flat. This portion here mounts to the bottom of your hard shell rooftop tent. Your extrusions will be running front to back on your tent. This mounts to that extrusion, slide it to where you want, and we make sure that the width of this bracket from that little indent right there to the other bracket little indent matches the width of the slots on your platform. So when you lay that down on there, this will mount in here, the slot will lay right here, it'll sit on the roof rack system, this bracket will come in, claps onto that tab over here. We have a carriage bolt that goes down through, and that clamps it around the slat of the K9 roof rack. So your slat is actually in this slot right here running front to back. You have four of these in position that holds your hard shell rooftop tent to a K9 roof rack system.

Alright, so if you want to take this off, all you have to do is take four nuts off of here, this bracket falls away, slides off, and you can lift the rooftop tent directly on and off. Makes it about a 15-minute process to remove the hard shell tent from your vehicle. Very simple, very strong way of mounting a hard shell tent to a K9 roof rack. It works quite well. This one's not so much applicable to other flat racks because this space right here is designed specifically for the K9 slat, which is a certain size, so putting this on another flat rack might not really work out so well.

Those are the three options that Eezi-Awn has prepared for mounting to a rack or a low bar set. We have one more application that I think is very handy that we use quite often.

Load Bar Mount

This one is made by our friends at AT Overland. They, for a very, very long time, were making trailers that they were putting load bars on the top of the trailers and using Eezi-Awn tents on the top of those load bars. So what they needed is a quick mount that they could use around a rectangular or even a round bar to hold the tent in place, and so what they did is they came up with this application here. What this is, is a set of plates. One plate goes inside the extrusion on the bottom of the rooftop tent. It's not the little slot or the slots, but in the main cavity of that extrusion, there's a carriage bolt front and rear. One bolt goes in front of the load bar, one goes behind. A bottom plate goes into place, and you tighten the nuts on the bottom. Four of these would hold a rooftop tent on the load bars on an AG trailer. Well, we've been using them for quite some time for folks that are using either the Yakima round bars or the Thule square bars or Rhino bar. If, as long as the fitment in here works, this is a great opportunity and it's very cost-effective as well.

So between these four applications, we've given you a lot of opportunities to mount your tent to whatever you have. I hope these have been some help. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at equiptone.com. We're happy to help. Thank you.

End Transcript