Video Transcript for Comprehensive Review: Erickson Re-Tractable Ladder Rack Straps

Ellen: Hey everybody. I'm Ellen here at etrailer.com and we're taking a quick look at the Ladder Rack Straps from Erickson. This is going to come as a pair to put on your ladder rack to make sure that all your gear is tightened down. The really cool thing about these ratchet straps is that they retract really nicely. We'll have our brackets, got a couple different spacers to work with a couple different diameters or sizes of pipes or attachment points, but as far as the overall use of these straps they're really nice and easy. We've got this nice oversized handle here.

If you press on the little red tab on the inside, that allows you to retract any Slack that you have. Press that button and push it down. That strap comes right back in to release it, pulls out just as easy and then again comes right back.Really nice that it just snaps everything together, you don't have to sit there and roll up your strap every time or even ratchet it down to get everything tightened up really tight. Really makes it quick and easy to get those straps pushed out or pulled out and then put back together. As far as that ratcheting mechanism, we come up, works nice and easy.

The thing that I like about this is that this handle is kind of rubber coated and it just has a nice kind of heavy feel to it, not like it's hard to use, but it just feels really solid. Not like it's a really flimsy piece of plastic or flimsy piece of metal just has a nice feel to it overall. I think these are going to do great for many years. Then again with those brackets, they're pretty typical for a lot of different brands, as far as the attachment point to your roof, or excuse me to your ladder rack.You'll just have to drill a couple holes to go through there for that hardware to go in. It does come with that attachment hardware and then the ratchet straps have a hole on the backside, which is going to match up with the holes on the bracket.

You can either put it kind of lower or higher depending on your situation, and then get that attached with these bolts here. We'll have one for either strap set. The different spaces that we have, we'll just close down this opening to make it a more tight fit or snug fit on different size bars without any kind of spacer. It works for a two inch round bar, and then we'll have the next one, or we'll have a square spacer. This works with inch and a quarter square bars and then inch and a quarter or excuse me, inch and three quarter round bars and inch and a quarter round bars.Those are the different spacers there and that's the same for either side.

You can also get this kit as just a single strap. It's kind of to you, if you just want to use one, but really when you're using ratchet straps, you should always have two to make sure that you're going in both directions to secure down your gear. That just makes sure that everything is nice and secure. As far as the weight capacity for these straps, they do have a thousand pound brake strength or excuse me, a thousand pound working load limit. The break strength is 3000 pounds. You always want to go off of that working load limit of a thousand pounds though. That's going to be the number to go by to make sure that you don't have any issues going down the road. With both straps that safe working load limit will go up to 2000 pounds as long as you have everything strapped down correctly.One other nice thing about the brackets of these attached to, is that once you have these mounted on, you can push that or pull the strap out and then actually hook it back onto itself. This little oblong hole at the bottom will allow you to have an access point to hook, that double J hook in place. All in all, I think this is a really great kit makes for a really quick and easy way to strap down your gear. My favorite part of it again, is that really quick retraction of the strap to make it just a lot faster to get everything pulled out or to get it pulled back in. I hope this has been helpful in deciding if this is going to be the right strap kit for you. We do have a lot of other options available here at etrailer.com, so if you want to check them out, please do. Thanks for watching..