Has anyone else played with getting a fairing to fit on the factory roof rack? So far, I've got two fairings sitting in my apartment. And old style Yakima one from my Golf I traded in - this fairing is too wide - and a new style Yakima 32" fairing that looks nice when propped up against the roof rack, but I haven't mounted it successfuly to the rack yet.

Here are some hints if anyone else wants to play with this. The new Yakima fairings, while they look nice against the car, have some problems.

First, the only things that comes between the plastic fairing and your roof (or sunroof) is a little rubber foot on the bottom of each of the plastic arms Yakima uses to mount the fairing. Since the plastic arms aren't of use with the MINI load bars, the plastic feet aren't either. To get around this, I stole the rubber strip that went on the bottom of my old yakima fairing and put it on the new one.

Second, those molded plastic arms the new faring uses aren't that easy to modify. Metal is much easier.

My other problem is that I have the MINI factory snowboard carrier which uses up about a foot of the channel in the load bar, so I cannot get to the channel to mount anything else.

My first (failed) attempt at mounting the fairing consisted of a few trips to Home Depot. I bought a cordless drill, some metal wall stud ties (6"(?)x1" thin bendable drillable metal pieces with some holes already drilled in them) and some 2"(?) wire drawer pulls (handles). I connected the wall stud ties to the fairing, bent them to the right shape, drilled some holes, and used the drawer pulls as U bolts to go around the load bars. It sort of worked, but not really.

A much better idea would be to use the channel in the load bar to connect a homemade bracket to. A block that slides into the channel with a threaded hole in it seems to make sense to me, but I don't have the stuff to make one myself. And, I have to see if I can position the factory snowboard carrier so I can free up the channel in the three places the three brackets would have to attach.

Two hints if anyone plays with the new-style Yakima fairings:
1) Don't use the black plastic rivets/plugs to connect any sort of arm to the fairing until you are sure you have everything figured out. I don't think there is a non-destructive way to remove these rivets/plugs.
2) See if you can scrounge up the rubber protective strip from an old Yakima fairing to use on a new style one. You can get a longer strip than you need and cut it down to size.

Anyone else working on this problem? Anyone who can fabricate up something to mount a vertical bolt into the load bar channel? There's not much force being exerted by the fairing, so it doesn't have to be bulletproof (like it would if you were attaching a bike carrier).

Here's an image of the Yakima fairing (from the Yakima website):

 

First of all, if you had to go buy a cordless drill (for the 1st time), you probably don't need to be modifying mounting hardware. Seriously, I've had Yakima roof racks for years and must say that although the newest fairing design and mounting system looks cleaner, it's much less stable and secure. I had great luck with it on an Isuzu Trooper. but just took one off of a Toyota Sequoia out of frustration (more wind noise than without it / vibration of the mounts on the roof).

That being said, you probably should have foregone the factory rack and went with the Yakima if you wanted the fairing. Maybe someone will come out with a factory add-on. I'll be mounting the Yakima next month and will post the results.

 

Turn up the radio so you can drown out the wind noise :smile: