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Hello neighbor, this is Curt with etrailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at the Thule WingBar Evo roof rack, and we're gonna see how it fits and how it installs on our 2025 Jeep Wagoneer. Now, when you're preparing for your next journey and you find yourself in a situation where you've got gear that either won't fit in the vehicle with you or it's gear that you just don't want riding in the vehicle with you, a roof rack could be an excellent way to transport that to and from your destination. It makes for a better alternative for a lot of people than carrying extra cargo out of the hitch, whether it be a hitch basket, hitch cargo carrier, or even a trailer just reduces that footprint. You know, making parking and things like that a whole lot easier. When you carry things up on the roof, you do have to worry about rooftop clearance, but in most cases, that isn't as big of an issue as creating a longer footprint.
And on the Wagoneer it's a big enough vehicle as it is. So a roof rack is gonna be able to carry a lot of those rooftop accessories like rooftop cargo boxes, rooftop baskets, platform racks, bike carriers, kayak carriers, ski and snowboard carriers, even awnings that can help give you some shade when you reach, you know that camping trip or you know, maybe it's a tailgating event or something like that. A roof rack is gonna have a lot of great uses for you. And the WingBar Evo is an aero style roof rack, an aero style crossbar, meaning it has an ovular shape, this is gonna be a lot more aerodynamic, it's gonna reduce a lot of those vibrations you get on the road. So it'll be a much less noisy alternative to your traditional round or square bars.
This is gonna offer 60 inches of bar space, and we've got an overhang here of just a little over five inches. So that's gonna give you that extra room that you can mount rooftop accessories side by side because those clamp mounted accessories have a place to clamp onto outside of the tower. They're gonna have a 165 pound weight capacity as well. However, you do want to double check your rooftop weight capacity in your owner's manual. Whichever number is lower is gonna be the capacity that you're gonna have to pay attention to.
Now let's get up on the roof and check out how exactly this fits on our Wagoneer. So from up here on the roof, a few things to point out. One, we've got flush rails up here on our Wagoneer, which means we're gonna have fixed mounting points. That's gonna tell us exactly where our crossbars need to go. Now while that can be definitely helpful when we're initially setting it up, we're not gonna have the ability to move these closer together or further apart.
So one of the measurements that's gonna be really important for us is our crossbar spread. So we're gonna measure that from the center of our front bar to the center of our back bar, and we're gonna come up with right at 29 and a half inches. And that's a great crossbar spread if you ask me. Every rooftop accessory has a minimum and a maximum crossbar spread in order to be able to use that accessory. And at 29 and a half inches, that really puts us in a sweet spot. Most of those measurements end up being between 25 and 35 inches. So at 29 and a half, I'm really not too worried about coming across accessories I won't be able to use with this setup. The other thing we're gonna double check on is just how much height is this adding to our Wagoneer So if we measure from the center here up to the top of our bar where it just under five inches. So if you're concerned with rooftop clearance, if you know your vehicle height and you know your accessory height, just add that five inches to it and you should be able to determine whether you have clearance to get under certain areas. Underneath our bar, we're gonna have about three and a half inches, which is more than enough room for any of those clamp mounted accessories to go on here. Now with the 60 inch bar, we're getting about five inches of overhang as I mentioned earlier. And you know, a lot of people might be concerned with that overhang and head clearance, but the truth is, if you take a look at it, it's only just outside of my door threshold and as tall as the Wagoneer is, I'm really not all that worried about head clearance or anything like that. But installation of these crossbars is actually a pretty simple affair. Follow along and I'll show you exactly how we got these on the roof of our Wagoneer. So with the installation, our first order of business is going to be to put up our mounting brackets. There are four mounting bracket locations. There's two on the passenger side. We have one here where we'll be installing a bracket. We have one at the second row, and then on the driver's side, it's the same position directly across from these. So if you've got a trim tool or a flathead screwdriver, go ahead and grab that and we're gonna pop these plugs out to start. Then we're going to take our bracket, which is gonna look just like this. We want basically the rail here to go in where this cavity is with the open side on the outside and the plate of it right here. We're gonna have two bolt holes here that'll line up with our holes there. And we're gonna find in our fit kit, these bolts right here and an Allen key that goes with them. This is a security tool, so that's a measure against anybody coming along and taking your rack off of the rails. So we're gonna start by just threading a couple of bolts in and getting them started. Now I am tightening them down by hand. It's just a little bit easier to do than this Allen key. They are pretty close to the roof line, so getting a complete turn on this is a little bit difficult from the jump. Now one of the things that I did notice when putting some of the other brackets on is if I go into tighten one of these bolts, it is an oversized hole that the bolt goes through. So what I notice is if I over-tighten it, one side just kind of pops up a little bit too high. So as I tighten these down, I'm also putting a little bit pressure over the top of them to make sure that they go down flush. And when I get 'em hand tightened pretty well, I'm gonna go ahead and grab my tool at that point, since I don't really need to make complete rotations with it, and I'm gonna go ahead and tighten them all the way down. And once all of our brackets are installed, we can move on to assembling our towers. Now all four towers use the same parts and they could all be assembled at the same time. So what you'll do is you'll take your tower here, I'm gonna go ahead and remove this nut, and the clamp parts are gonna be stamped for us, okay So we're gonna have parts stamped with an A, with a B, and with a C, and they're gonna go on in that order. So I'm gonna take this part stamped A, I'm gonna put it in so that the bolt threads through this hole in the middle and these two tabs go into these portions here up on top. It's gonna go in just like that. Now I'm gonna hold that in place and turn it over on its back. I'm gonna take part B, which is this rubber foot pad, and I'm gonna get this installed as well. Now it's important that this back end of the A clamp, make sure that that's going over this middle section of your rubber foot pad. We're just gonna press that down into place till it's flush. Then I'm gonna take the C portion and I'm gonna put this on so that this part up here, this tab goes through it and this hole in the middle, the bolt will go through it. So I'm gonna put the tab in there, bring it down over the bolt, and then I'm gonna replace this nut on there as well. Now I'm only gonna really loosely thread it because I want to have as much of this clamp available to go on my mounting bracket up there, and once that's all assembled, we could get it onto our crossbar. To do that, we're gonna go ahead and depress this tab here and remove our end cap. Then there's this slot up here and these T fittings, we're just gonna slip that on, just like that. And at this point we could just replace the end cap and we're ready to get it up on the roof. So just from standing in the door threshold right here, I'm just gonna feed my crossbar over to the other side, just kind of get it in the neighborhood of that mounting bracket. And we're gonna just kind of let it fall into place here. Now there is a cavity underneath your rubber foot pad that's gonna go right in over that. I'm just looking in behind it to make sure that the clamp, the back end of the clamp is going in that slot and the front end of the clamp as well. Now I'm just gonna double check, make sure it's doing that on the passenger side. Now with our towers in place, next thing we need to adjust is going to be our crossbar overhang. So we really want the same amount of crossbar hanging over our tower on each side of the vehicle. So I've got my measuring tape here, I'm just gonna be taking some measurements and we're gonna make sure that we get that even on both sides. So on each side of the bar, from the edge of our tower up here to the edge of the bar, we got a measurement of about five and a half inches. Made sure it's the same over here on the driver's side as it is on the passenger. And at this point we could tighten down this nut right here, while that's being tightened down, it's gonna do two things. One, it's gonna clamp down on those mounting brackets and secure our tower to that. It's also gonna tighten down our crossbar onto our tower and secure that as well. Now Thule is gonna provide you with this tool in the kit. This is what you'll use to get that tightened down. And it is a torquing tool as well. So we're gonna get a nice loud pop when we know it's tight enough. Just like that. Once I do that on each tower, everything is tightened down the way it should be. And that just leaves us with our tower covers. Now, before I put it on there, I just want to talk about the tower cover for a quick moment. When you get this out of the kit, it's gonna come with these plastic lock cores. It's got a little slot on it. They could be locked and unlocked using a flathead screwdriver or a coin like a nickel or a quarter or something like that. But that's not necessarily entirely secure. So I would encourage you to take advantage of Thule's one key system. What that's gonna allow you to do is buy metal lock cores for each of your towers and a key to go along with it, and it can be keyed alike to any of your other Thule accessories that you already have or will be getting in the future. So if you have a rooftop box or a bike rack or something like that from Thule and it's got a lock on it, you can get the locks to your towers keyed alike to that so that you don't just have this mess of keys that you have to worry about what goes with what. You'll have one Thule key that you know works with all of your Thule products, but when it comes time to putting our tower cover on, there's these two tabs here. One is the lock core and the other is just a simple tab. They're gonna go into these slots right here and they'll just kind of push straight on and snap into place. At this point, you could take a flathead and we'll go ahead and lock it up. Now I always like to give it a good, you know, shake test here, make sure nothing's moving, our bar isn't moving, the tower's not moving. In fact, nothing's moving but the vehicle itself when I do this, so I know we got a good tight fit, and now we can get our roof rack loaded up and head out on our journey. And that's it for the installation. And if I'm gonna take a look at this set of crossbars, this particular roof rack, I wanna let you know that there is also a 53 inch bar version available at etrailer. However, I would recommend the 60 because you get this extra bit of overhang. I just think it's gonna be a lot more usable for you than the 53 inch version. But that version is here as well if you wanted to check that out. It should also be known that these come in silver and not just in black. You can get these in a silver crossbar if that particular aesthetic is you know, more pleasing to your eye, they're gonna work exactly the same, they're just gonna have a slightly different look. But if you have any questions regarding this roof rack on your 2025 Jeep Wagoneer, go ahead and leave those questions in the comments below. We would love to answer those for you. It'll help you and other neighbors just like you to make the best decision for yourself. Once again, this is Curt with etrailer. Thanks for stopping by.
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