Equipt 101: Roof Loads & Hard Shell Tents

Video Transcript

Another big question we get on the hard shell rooftop tents is whether it is possible to mount things on the top of the rooftop tents to carry them. That's a very tricky question. It's possible on the Blade tent, not so much the Stealth or the Dart, and here's why.

The Stealth is an aluminum frame and that works out great, but it is a full adjustable height on the rooftop tent, so the back raises as well as the front. That makes it very unstable on the top of that tent. The tent itself works great by itself, but if you start putting stuff on the top, that's going to really degrade it.

The Dart, which is a fiberglass model, is not a stable place to be putting a lot of weight. So, what we say is that let's work with the Blade as an opportunity for mounting things on the top.

Now, if you take a look at the Blade that we have here, what we did is we put on a set of mounting rail, canine feet, and load bars, all Easy On products. This has allowed us to add what we would like. We have a mounting rail, and we can slide those load bars wherever we need them to be to put whether it's a solar panel, a kayak, or Max Tracks, or whatever you want up there.

But the big trick about putting weight on the top of the tent is that the tent is designed to raise the roof by itself. We've added 20 pounds of load bar and an awning rail on the top of the roof, and now you start adding weight on top of that, which becomes a problem. So, you need to take that load off of the top of the Blade.

The maximum that I would put on the top of a Blade and open it up—in fact, I had to help this one get up—is a set of Max Tracks. With the Max Tracks and the load bars, you're looking at about 40 pounds of weight up there that you can put up there comfortably without an issue. Anything more than that, you need to take that off of the tent before you open the tent.