J-style cradles let you transport 1 kayak safely and securely on your roof rack crossbars. Carries kayak on its side to free up space for additional gear on your roof rack. Universal mount. Includes tie-downs.
Features:
Specs:
Installation Details 
Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Today we're going to be taking a look at the Yakima Jayhook Kayak Carrier with tie downs. Part number Y04084. The Jayhook Kayak Carrier is a fixed mount J style carrier that can carry up to one kayak upright, like you see it here. So you can actually have more space on your roof rack or crossbars to fit more accessories. These fit the aftermarket crossbars as you can see here. But these will also fit some factory style crossbars as well.
The tie down straps and the bow and stern tie downs are included with this kit. And the tie down straps . buckles here have this rubber coating around it so it actually protects the hull of your kayak once you have it installed. And on the back we have padding here, as well as at the base to protect your hull as well once it's being installed. While the loading straps will secure your kayak to your actual roof rack, the bow and stern tie downs will actually anchor it to your vehicle. The bottom portion of our bow and stern will hook up to this buckle here, which will connect to your kayak.
At the base here you see that it actually has a plastic sheath that goes around and hooks up to our anchor point underneath our vehicle. Now, this plastic sheath is to protect your vehicle itself so it doesn't get scratched up once you're installing this strap. Unfortunately, now that we have our bow and stern tie downs attached we don't have rear hatch access. However, before we install them, once you have the kayak in place you're going to see that there's not going to be any clearance issue between the hatch and the kayak in this particular case. This is very easy to install. It just clamps around your existing roof rack or aftermarket roof rack and ties down with these turn knobs here.
This will fit round, square, aero, elliptical on most factory crossbars. It has a minimum crossbar spread requirement of 24 inches and can carry up to one kayak that weighs up to 80 pounds, and has a limited lifetime warranty. When comparing this to other kayak carriers one that comes up is the Rhino-Rack J Style Kayak carrier. The biggest difference between these two is going to be what type of bars this actually fits around but with the Yakima fitting around arrow, factory, round, square and elliptical and the Rhino-Rack only fitting around factory, round or elliptical. Now that we got over some of the features of the kayak character, let's go ahead and show you how it installs. We have our rear mount here. Here's the clamp bottom here.
The upper portion of the clamp. The pads where the kayak would sit on, we have the bow and stern tie downs, as well as the regular tie downs to your J Hooks. And here of course are the hardware that you'll need for it. So let's get started. We'll first start by assembling the rest of our J hook here. We'll take our metal bracket and we'll place it in the center like so. Then we'll take our padding and that just pushes into place on top of that. Now, to hold this into place you'll see these eight small holes all the way around the padding. And for that we're going to need these push pins and you'll just push those into place to hold this into place. However, since this is a permanent install this is for demonstration purposes we'll go ahead and leave this out for now. If you do need to adjust this for a different configuration, you can find replacement parts on etrailer.com. Next, we'll get the bottom portion of our clamp ready. You'll see it has a slotted section on one side and a square hole on the other. And as you guessed it, this end will go through the square hole. While the T will go through the slot, like so. Now, you notice that you have two different sizes here with the bolts. Once you install this and tying it down with these knobs here, you don't want the bolts going past the knobs. So, for today's purposes we're going to be using the smaller bolts. So, I'll push that through the square hole and this through the T slot hole. We'll guide them through our metal bracket and we'll just loosely install turn knobs up at the top on both sides, just to hold this in place. Now, the reason why it has the slotted end on one side . it's kind of like a quick release so you don't have to remove the top knobs here completely. You just push it up a little bit. Turn it to the side and it comes loose, like so. Now we're ready to set this on our rear cross bar. Set it on our rear bar. Try to match it up with the one that we installed in the front. We can bring our clamp up and attach it to our T bolt on the back here. Now, this doesn't have to be even with the top portion here as long as it's as vertical as it can possibly be on the top. And remember you do not want the bolt poking through the turn knobs. All right, now we're ready to load up our kayak. So we'll take our kayak, put it into place. Kind of get it evened out from front to back. Then we can start tying it down to the mounts themselves. First tie down that we're going to work with is our cam 00:05:13 buckle with the rubber protected end. We'll roll it out and take the one end and put it over the kayak, like so. Then we'll come around to the back of the carrier. We'll take the end that we just threw over, wrap it around the back of our J hook and then we can wrap it around our crossbar. Bring it up so our buckle is making contact with the kayak. Then we'll take our other end, wrap it behind the roof rack. Bring it back up and make our connection to our cam buckle here. We'll feed it through and tying it down. Make sure nothing's tangled here. All right and we'll repeat that for our front tie down too. Now, with both tie downs attached we'll take up the excess and tie it off. Now we can move on to our bow and stern tie downs. We'll start with our top portion of the strap around our front handle, wrap it around like so. Push the buckle in through the loop and pull it tight. And we'll repeat this for the rear handle as well. Now we can install the bottom half of our bow and stern tie downs. We'll unravel them. Take the end with the plastic sheets on it, the end of that will have a loop that we'll put our included hook through. Attached it, like so. Then we'll go underneath the front of our car and find a suitable point to attach our hook to. This is going to vary from vehicle to vehicle. Tow loop would work. There we go. Making sure that the sheath is against the car and then we'll attach it to our buckle. We'll thread it through. Then we'll pull it as tight as we can. And we'll repeat this for the rear tie down point and then we'll tie off our excess again. We can use our hitch as our rear point. And I'll tie off our excess. And there you have it for the Yakima Jayhook Kayak Carrier with tie downs, part number Y04084.
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (5 Customer Reviews)
J-style cradles let you transport 1 kayak safely and securely on your roof rack crossbars. Carries kayak on its side to free up space for additional gear on your roof rack. Universal mount. Includes tie-downs.Have only taken it out once so far but it was easy to put on and use. Could be easy for someone to steal, I put bike locks on mine to prevent that. 72103
Easy to install and work great. Hauled a kayak at 70mph and not a single worry at all when correctly secure. 699287
easy to install...very haPPY WITH YOUR SERvice 585411
I really like this JayHooks. They are well made. They are easy to use (install on top of my vehicle). The customer service is great as well. 563965
I have four of these. Never had a problem. When you can get them on sale I think these are the best bang for the buck as far as kayak carriers go. 89543
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