Hi all, I just wanted to share some pictures and impressions about a particular set of aftermarket cross bars that I happened to come into possession of.
To put the summary right at the top: I would only ever recommend OEM cross bars, or those from an OEM supplier such as Thule.
These particular bars reviewed here I would summarize as thus: They look good, but they aren't good.
Let's get into the details...
So I said I only ever prefer to go with OEM yet I ended up with these, how did that happen? Well, I was actually trying to purchase an OEM set for our Cherokee because we had a big ski trip coming up. The OEM ones were on backorder and out of desperation I tried ordering some aftermarket ones instead just to get us by for one trip. Well, what the ebay seller sent me by total random chance were not for a Cherokee, but actually for a 2nd gen Compass... Needless to say we had to go on our trip without any cross bars and I fired off an angry message to the seller. Ultimately they refunded me something like 50% and let me keep the wrong ones they had sent. I threw them on the shelf in the garage until last weekend, when I had a little free time and thought "eh, lets give them a try on the Compass, maybe they will be good enough for lightweight stuff like our paddle boards."
(I maybe should mention I never had an OEM set for the Compass, I had a homemade steel rack some of you may remember)
Anyways, I took all the parts out and assembled them:
Basically what we have here with these is a design that is probably sound in the 3D modeling software of some designer's computer, but in practice/real world application these are ultimately cheap plastic clamps that you can't trust as far as you can throw them.
To their credit, they have come up with something clever that allows them to sell the same top portion of the clamp mated to different designs of the bottom portions so they can support a wide range of vehicles with fewer parts. The design is clever, but its all just plastic other than the aluminum extrusion of the bars themselves. How this plastic will hold up over months and years in the hot sun, extreme colds of winter, etc will be interesting to see. I predict that they crack for sure, I just don't know when.
The inner portion of the clamps they sent me does not fit the Compass well, and does not utilize any of the bolt holes that exist on the inside of the factory roof rail. By the stock design you are relying on these plastic clamps which just have a tiny bite of the rail, to hold your cargo on your roof. Pretty sketchy.
I looked at this and an idea came to my head to quickly and easily improve the retention and location of these clamps on the rails. I grabbed myself some 3/4" steel pipe strap (sometimes called hanger strap, found for $3 at your local hardware store) and I cut myself four pieces of it with 4 holes of length each:
Long-term these should have been brackets I could have probably easily made with my bending brake, and painted up nicely, but at this point this was all just an experiment to see how these bars looked once mounted up and I knew there was a strong chance I'd be taking them off in the near future (because I could see that the plastic design sucked...)
So instead of painting, I wrapped each one with a piece of black duct tape to temporarily keep rust at bay and bolted them into the factory rool rails at the positions I was going to use. The upper hole on each strap ended at more or less the right height to engage with the long clamping bolt used on the aftermarket rail clamps:
On each one I then put the outer portion of the clamp, with the clamping bolt through the pipe strap, and then supplied my own lock nut to tighten up the strap like so:
The bolts in the rails are stainless steel hardware, 1/4"-ish bolts of some kind, it is listed elsewhere on the forum here what the thread pitch of these is but its nothing rare or special.
So now these straps I have added provide what the aftermarket design does not (but could have and should have), a physical connection to the car to keep the brackets holding the cross bars in place and keep them from flying off if the plastic clamps crack and fail.
From here I still install the inner-portion of the aftermarket clamps on that long bolt as they intended, so my straps end up sandwiched in the middle, hardly noticeable but making me feel much more secure about the likelihood that these will stay on my roof over time.
In the next post below I will have pictures of the finished install and point out another problem with these particular bars, gimme 5-10 minutes here...
To put the summary right at the top: I would only ever recommend OEM cross bars, or those from an OEM supplier such as Thule.
These particular bars reviewed here I would summarize as thus: They look good, but they aren't good.
Let's get into the details...
So I said I only ever prefer to go with OEM yet I ended up with these, how did that happen? Well, I was actually trying to purchase an OEM set for our Cherokee because we had a big ski trip coming up. The OEM ones were on backorder and out of desperation I tried ordering some aftermarket ones instead just to get us by for one trip. Well, what the ebay seller sent me by total random chance were not for a Cherokee, but actually for a 2nd gen Compass... Needless to say we had to go on our trip without any cross bars and I fired off an angry message to the seller. Ultimately they refunded me something like 50% and let me keep the wrong ones they had sent. I threw them on the shelf in the garage until last weekend, when I had a little free time and thought "eh, lets give them a try on the Compass, maybe they will be good enough for lightweight stuff like our paddle boards."
(I maybe should mention I never had an OEM set for the Compass, I had a homemade steel rack some of you may remember)
Anyways, I took all the parts out and assembled them:
Basically what we have here with these is a design that is probably sound in the 3D modeling software of some designer's computer, but in practice/real world application these are ultimately cheap plastic clamps that you can't trust as far as you can throw them.
To their credit, they have come up with something clever that allows them to sell the same top portion of the clamp mated to different designs of the bottom portions so they can support a wide range of vehicles with fewer parts. The design is clever, but its all just plastic other than the aluminum extrusion of the bars themselves. How this plastic will hold up over months and years in the hot sun, extreme colds of winter, etc will be interesting to see. I predict that they crack for sure, I just don't know when.
The inner portion of the clamps they sent me does not fit the Compass well, and does not utilize any of the bolt holes that exist on the inside of the factory roof rail. By the stock design you are relying on these plastic clamps which just have a tiny bite of the rail, to hold your cargo on your roof. Pretty sketchy.
I looked at this and an idea came to my head to quickly and easily improve the retention and location of these clamps on the rails. I grabbed myself some 3/4" steel pipe strap (sometimes called hanger strap, found for $3 at your local hardware store) and I cut myself four pieces of it with 4 holes of length each:
Long-term these should have been brackets I could have probably easily made with my bending brake, and painted up nicely, but at this point this was all just an experiment to see how these bars looked once mounted up and I knew there was a strong chance I'd be taking them off in the near future (because I could see that the plastic design sucked...)
So instead of painting, I wrapped each one with a piece of black duct tape to temporarily keep rust at bay and bolted them into the factory rool rails at the positions I was going to use. The upper hole on each strap ended at more or less the right height to engage with the long clamping bolt used on the aftermarket rail clamps:
On each one I then put the outer portion of the clamp, with the clamping bolt through the pipe strap, and then supplied my own lock nut to tighten up the strap like so:
The bolts in the rails are stainless steel hardware, 1/4"-ish bolts of some kind, it is listed elsewhere on the forum here what the thread pitch of these is but its nothing rare or special.
So now these straps I have added provide what the aftermarket design does not (but could have and should have), a physical connection to the car to keep the brackets holding the cross bars in place and keep them from flying off if the plastic clamps crack and fail.
From here I still install the inner-portion of the aftermarket clamps on that long bolt as they intended, so my straps end up sandwiched in the middle, hardly noticeable but making me feel much more secure about the likelihood that these will stay on my roof over time.
In the next post below I will have pictures of the finished install and point out another problem with these particular bars, gimme 5-10 minutes here...