Today on this 2011 Honda Pilot we will be installing a Yakima roof rack using the Yakima RailGrab Towers part number Y00138 and the Yakima 58 inch cross bars part number Y00409. There are three basic components to the rail grab kit. The first is the RailGrab tower itself, the second is the additional set of claws, and the third is the end caps for the load bars. You can also purchase separately the Yakima SKS lock core system. The lock cores will replace this knock-out and will provide a way for you to lock the door closed to prevent someone your rack from the vehicle. Yakima includes two different sets of claws to adapt to a different size in shaped factory rails. 00:43
Preinstalled on the towers in the box is the smaller claw. This is the claw you will need for most factory rail installations. It is also what we are going to be using today on the Honda Pilot. On the back side of the tower is a tension knob. By loosening this knob you can slide the claw up and down on the RailGrab tower. If you remove the knob completely you will be able to swap out the claws. The first step in assembly is to slide the tower onto the crossbar. To do this, open the door on the RailGrab and loosen the silver tensioning screw with the provided Allen key. When loosened the crossbar teeth will move out of the way so that we can slip the tower over the cross bar. After you slide the tower over the bar put the end cap in place to keep the tower from sliding off. We will repeat the same process for the other three towers. 01:26
Once everything is assembled together loosely fit them on top of the roof of your vehicle. You may want an extra set of hands to help you with the opposite side of the vehicle and to help make sure you do not scratch the roof. Once on the vehicle the first step is to adjust the claw height. On this particular side rail profile we are going to the claw into the opening. Once you have the height of the claws set you can look at the side of the claw track for the depth measurements and use that as a reference for the rest of the claws. After the height is set on all of the towers open the doors and begin to tighten down the black screws. The black screws are going to pull the claws to the crossbar and clamp the tower onto the side rail. We will go to the opposite side and repeat the same process. Once you have all of the towers tightened Yakima wants to make sure that you have three solid contact points, one at the top of the rail, one at the bottom, and one at the back side of the rail at the claw. 02:16
After the contact points are established check the overhang of the crossbars, you want to make sure that they are even on both sides of the vehicle. Once the overhang is set we will go back to the towers and tighten the silver screws to clamp the crossbars into place. Now that we have the front crossbar locked into place it would be a good time to check the instructions for any of the accessories that you are going to put on your roof rack to see what the recommended crossbars for it is. We will be using a Yakima roof box and we will be setting our crossbars to 34 inches from the center of the front to the center of the rear. Once the spread is set we will repeat the same tightening process for the rear crossbars. With our roof rack installed and tightened down we can place our roof box into position. This rack will accommodate a wide variety of roof rack accessories, just be sure the accessory you choose will fit the cross bar spread that you are using on your vehicle and make sure that it is also compatible with Yakima round style crossbars. That will finish it for the Yakima RailGrab roof rack on our 2011 Honda Pilot.
