Surco Safari Roof Rack - Mounting

Now you may have noticed that I had 3 Crossbars on my rack. I ordered an extra 48" pair from Surco (one bar went to The Roadie) because of what I was going to be putting on the rack.

However, I quickly realized that this was not going to work the way I anticipated. The Trailblazer roof rails follow the contour of the roof and are significantly bowed from front to back. What this means is that you cannot attach all 3 crossbars to the rails.

What I ended up doing was using the extra one at the rear so that the AT Can Holders are firmly attached to both crossbars. The front and middle (sort of) crossbars are attached to the roof rails. The rear one is not attached to anything. But, with some experimentation, I ended up putting 1 of the factory sliding crossbars back into the rails, sliding it all the way to the back, and using it as a support for the rear Surco crossbar. It rests quite nicely on the factory crossbar which would be extra helpful when the cans are full of gas.

Which brings me to:
Hint #3 - Buy but don't use the Surco Channel Adapters - Part# CH100

These add unwanted height to the whole assembly and also another point of potential breakage, although I am sure they are strong enough for the weight rating of the Safari Rack. The parts circled A will be used but everything else under normal circumstances will not. You would normally buy 2 CH100 part numbers which would result in 4 mounting points, but I only bought 1 in order to use the parts.

Surco may sell or provide just those parts but last year I did not have time to talk to their customer service and request them. Ultimately, I was glad that I didn't because I ended up using the parts circled B to mount the AT gas can holders to the crossbars.

Again, The Roadie steered me to this great solution which is made possible purely by some kind of strange coincidence.

It just happens that with the 45" wide Surco racks, the inside crossbar attachment bolts fall directly at the location of our roof rails. Here's a closeup:

So what you do is not mount the left side of the tab in the normal fashion but you drill a hole straight through the crossbar at the exact location of the hole in the mounting tab.

Second, you get 2" bolts (4) that will be used with the parts circled A. I don't know the thread particulars but you can take the tab with you (which is threaded) and use it to get the correct bolt. I would not recommend using stainless as they may not be strong enough. In fact, I am going to try to get some grade 5 or possible 8 bolts to replace the ones I have now.

And finally you slide the tabs right into the roof rails and bolt the entire thing down. Just be prepared to spend some time fiddling with the tabs in order to bolt everything down. They are a tad too narrow to make things easy (what else is new).

When bolting down you need to make sure that they end up sitting flat inside the rails and NOT on a vertical angle which would make the entire mounting problematic. The tabs need to be rotated horizontally so that they catch the underside of the roof rails absolutely flat across their surface.

Once the tabs are mounted perfectly, the whole set up is rock-solid. I was apprehensive at first with all the weight I was going to be putting up there but I did not run into any problems whatsoever on the trip. One thing that helps is that the tabs are aluminium and the underside of the roof rails are ribbed. These small ribs actually dig into the tabs slightly for added gripping.