Thule SnowPack Ski and Snowboard Carrier - 6 Skis or 4 Boards - Black

Video Transcript for Thule SnowPack Ski and Snowboard Carrier Review

Today, we're going to be taking a look at the Thule SnowPack Ski and Snowboard Carriers with the six-ski or four-board capacity in black. The part number is TH7326B. This is also available in black as a four-ski to two-board design. The part number there is TH7324B. Overall, Thule has created a really nice product. It's a really sleek, well-designed product.

It's going to be very corrosion resistant if you're using it as a ski and snowboard carrier. Of course, you could use these for fishing poles too in warmer weather, but you're going to be encountering a lot of that road salt, the winter weather, and stuff that can really play havoc on items.Across the top here and the bottom, this is going to be all aluminum construction. The ends here where you're going to be touching it, this is all a heavy-duty plastic material. Then everything inside is going to be coated to protect against the elements. The rubber that clamps down on our skis here, it's going to keep it protected very well.

You can see there's a lot of give there, but it's also very sturdy. You've got a softer outer layer. As it gets compressed more it gets a little bit firmer. At no point, even with really thick sets of skis, are we going to have to worry about it making any contact with the aluminum, so they're going to be protected really well.An important measurement to help decide whether this is going to be a right fit for you especially if you have taller SUVs, and maybe this is going on top of a mini van or a truck. When you're pulling in and out of the garage, from the top of the cross bar here to the top of the carrier it's going to be about 5 1/8 of an inch.

You'll just to ensure that you have that kind of space so you don't have to worry about it knocking into the garage door or something like that. If you do the T-track accessory that has the spacer, it's going to be almost identical to that 5 1/8 of an inch. If you do it without, you're going to reduce that down to about 4 inches because remember we've got that 1 1/8 spacer.Now when it comes time to load your skis and snowboards we're going to use the large button here on the end. I like the design. It sticks out past the end of the carrier so even with thick gloves on you can just use your palm, press on it.

You can see we're not pressing in on a button and trying to lift it. The button actually rotates the direction we want it to go anyway. You can see there's going to be a small gap there when it's open. That allows us to slide our skis or snowboard in there without having to use one hand to hold it up. Something that I really like about this carrier, you're going to see when I close it, it keeps it a very nice low profile when it's not in use. There's a spring hinge located right here. Once we have our items loaded up, and we close it, and notice as we pull down we've got that expansion over there keeping everything nice and secure.You can see the way it really conforms around all of our gear and holds it in place really, really well. Notice we've got one snowboard with the curve facing down. To load a second one on top you'll want that to face up. With all of our gear in, it's time to secure it, so we'll just place that in and turn it. You can see that's now going to be inoperable. Also, you'll want to turn your foot pack into the lock position. Basically what that's going to do, if you need to quickly adjust the tension on it, it will allow you to do that, but it won't allow you to loosen it. As you try to back that up it's going to keep that from rotating. While you can still tighten a little bit, nobody is going to be able to take that off your roof rack system.Now this is six-skier four-board version. Basically, from the inside edge here over to the other side we're going to have about 29 1/2 inches of usable space. The actual internal rubber is going to be about 30 1/2, but the way this turns in a little bit, you're going to lose a little bit of that space. I'm going to call it usable space of 29 1/2. Ali in all the snow pack from Thule is going to give you a very good way to get skis or snowboards out there where you want to go. In the off season these can also be used for fishing poles. We've used them here a few different times in a few different configurations and they work out pretty well. Now even with the low profile and newer design that we see there's a lot of technology built in. It's going to make using this carrier extremely easy, and it's going to protect our skis and snowboards from any kind of damage.A question we very, very often is, "Are my bindings going to hit my roof on my snowboard" Generally, the snowboard bindings are larger than what you see on the skis. Basically, to help you out with that just as a guide, this isn't going to be a rule, but from where our snowboards are centered right here down to the top of the rack, we're looking at just over 3 1/4 inches. Let's say 3 3/8 of an inch. Now if you take that measurement and you add it to the distance between your roof and the top of your crossbar that can give you a pretty good idea as to whether it can accommodate your bindings. Now, you can see we do have bindings installed on this snowboard, and it gives us adequate room. Now these bindings do collapse. I don't know if there are some that remain fixed, but if you had one that collapsed and one that remained fixed, the one that stayed fixed would probably have to go up. There's not going to be a tremendous amount of room, but if they'll collapse like this you shouldn't have any type of issues.Something else that really appreciate about this setup, and you'll see it when we install it. There are no tools required, so there's nothing you can forget at the house or nothing you can leave behind that will prevent you from putting these on or taking them off. To mount the ski and snowboard carrier to the roof line of your vehicle, of course you're going to need a roof rack. The nice thing about this kit is it's going to work with a t-slot roof rack system, or we also have the foot packs that we can simply add on to the bottom. These are going to work out with your square bars, round bars, elliptical, the arrow-shaped bars, and most of your factory roof rack systems. The only ones that these really won't work out for is going to be the really big square heavy-duty bars from Rhino Rack, or also an Xterra. It's got a really big round roof rack on it. These just aren't quite big enough to make that happen, but outside of that it's going to work with just about anything.As far as your t-slot accessories, and if you have a roof rack that has a t-slot accommodation you're going to know it. It has that black strip that runs through the middle. You've got the short and long t-slot bolts that you can see there. We're going to have a short spacer. This should be on the entire time. This, you shouldn't mount it really to your roof rack without at least this on there. By using this you can buy another inch and an 1/8 essentially. It's going to raise it up just a little bit higher. That can help give you coverage for some of those bindings. This is going to fit on, see the hole in the middle of it, we want to align that with the hole. You're going to press down and it's going to click into place just like that. You just want to ensure that that bolt is able to pass through there. If you want that extra room to get it a little bit higher, this one's just going to click right into that.At that point, our bolt should be able to pass through. Now we can open up our carrier here. Don't forget to hit the button all the way. This rubber strip, this is our padding for our ski and snowboards. We want to pull that up and out. It rests in this little channel right here. That's going to give us access inside. Pretty much you're going to do that all the way across and that's going to expose the hole here on the inside. If we're going to use in the t-slot configuration, we want to bring our T screw up and through like that. We're going to take one of our tensioning levers here and going to thread that down on. We just need to get this started. At that point, once we get both of them started, you'll see how our t-slot bolt hangs down here. That's going to allow us to slide it into that t-track.For our application, like we said, we going to be wrap around. I think the advantage of the foot pack style rather than the t-slot, you can take it off a lot easier. The t-slot accessory, you'll have to pull this out each time to loosen these up. If we do it the other way and use our foot packs, we can actually take this off just with the foot pack with that rubber-coated steel strap that goes around. Now using our clamp-style foot pack, you can see it's going to have the same screw on the top. That's going to come up and through. We're going to thread this down on. At this point, we're just going to tighten this to secure the foot pack to the carrier. This is one-time installation. This isn't something you're going to have to repeat over and over. Get that tensioned down and we'll just lay over in there like that. We're going to do the same thing for the other hole that we have in the bottom. Now once we have both of those installed, we just press down. You can see it doesn't take a whole lot of force. We're just going to get that fed back in. Just go all the way over to the end there. Just like that. At that point that's ready to go on our vehicle.One more thing we want to talk about is lock core placement. You're going to have four lock cores that come with this. That's going to help you to secure the entire rack to your vehicle. You can set up your cores however you want in whatever position. I like those that have one in the end of each carrier you can see here. If you look around the outside there's going to be a little area down here from about the 6:00 to 9:00 position that has a little bit of a bevel on it. The rest of it on the outside, it's going to have a flat spot. This small tab, once your key is inserted into your lock core, we're going to have one small tab that sticks up right here. We want to align that with that beveled edge and push it in. We've got that in. I'm going to turn. Let's see here. It causes that to be inoperable.With the other two I like to put one in each foot pack that's closest to my release lever. There's also going to be two black plugs. Those are going to go in the one furthest from my release lever. Basically, the reason I do it that way is because this is going to be more accessible. We're going to have our key out to lock or unlock this, so we'll also have it there if we need it. If we we're to put it on this one, this is going to be closer to the middle of our car. Now to install it on your roof rack system, if you are using the t-slot, remember you just want to either rotate or take off your end cap then you're able just to remove that strip and slide that t-bolt right in there. We recommend replacing the rubber strip outside of those t-bolts just to keep noise down.When you're doing this style, we're just going to place this right up on the roof rack system. You can see the rear has already been installed there. We want to get it centered. I'm going to bring that strap up and around, and it's goin to rest right there in the groove on the front. We want to ensure that we have this even with the one in the back. We'll start tightening it down by turning our knob right here. We'll do the same thing for our other base there. All right. Nice and secure. We'll just get our skis put up in position first. We'll also be loading a snowboard. With the snowboard it doesn't it doesn't matter which way you have it forward and back. With your skis you want to have the flared ends, the tips, facing the rear. That way they don't catch wind as you're heading down the road. Now we'll slide those over far enough and we get our snowboard put in. It's a good idea to have them fairly straight front to back.Now, with our gear loaded up, we just want to pull down on top. As we do this, you're going to have three audible clicks. It doesn't have to be all the way down if you've got thicker skis or thicker snowboards, but you do want to ensure that it's at least in one of them. Just going to pull it down just like that. That's going to complete our look at the Thule SnowPack Ski and Snowboard Carriers in black.