My hope is to carry two 10.5’ sit-on kayaks on the roof of my 2015 Mini 2-dr hardtop. The kayaks are about 65 lbs and 34” wide. They would likely have to be standing on their sides, either stacked with a single pair of brackets or a pair of brackets for each boat.

Do any of you have experience and/or recommendations for kayak carriers/brackets that’ll attach to the factory roof rack? Lockable capability is also of interest to me.

Thanks!

Jim

 

Hi, when you say the factory roof system - I take it that you mean the MINI cross bars attached to the built in rails? These can be a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to kayak and canoes. They are quite narrow and so kayaks can over hang the edges when put side by side. What you will probably need is uprights. These are just bars that go up vertically and can be placed anywhere along the cross bar. The only issue is that you will pre than likely need to be looking for ones that use the T channel system as the other style clamp around the bar and the MINI bars are too fat for this. With uprights you can either put them at one end of the cross bar and stack the two kayaks or you can put them in the middle and use them to stand the kayaks up on their sides.

as far as locking goes, I normally use a long bike lock to go through the grab handles or seats or anything on the kayaks and then round the bars. There are locking straps available from Thule I believe that have wire running through them to stop them being cut but I have no experience of these.

hope this helps

Andrew

 

Thanks Andrew. The kayaks I intend to buy for me and my wife are about 34” wide, so carrying them flat on the roof rack doesn’t seem like a great approach. There seems to be a number of products available to carry them on their sides. Some kayak brackets can have two kayaks attached to them, with a kayak lashed on both sides of the upright part of the bracket. The Yakima JayLow supports this. Stacked on their sides in this fashion, the kayaks would take up about 32”-33” of space on the crossbars. This would fit on the MINI’s factory roof rack (35.5” available). Unfortunately, the JayLow brackets only support about 110 lbs of two-kayak weight. I need to carry 130 lbs 2x65 lbs). Alternatively, using two pairs of kayak brackets could support the kayak weight, at the cost of more width used up on the roof rack. Edit: …and more money.

Yesterday, I went to a local shop that sells racks and all the various attachments. i measured how much roof rack width the Yakima JayLow brackets take up, in their normal 1-kayak use, and given a 34” wide kayak. It looks like they’d take up about 22” for each kayak. Throw in an inch or two to keep the kayaks from any chance of banging into each other, and it looks like the total rack width required is a minimum of 46”. So, this approach seems to handle the kayak weight, but is too wide for the factory roof rack.

So, at this point, I’m leaning towards an aftermarket roof rack (50” crossbars) and two pairs of kayak brackets. The JayLow brackets can be fitted with locks. Also, I’m going to look at the Thule locking straps and bike cable locks, per your suggestion Andrew. Thanks again!

 

Glad I was able to help in some way. Definitely the aftermarket bars will help. Just thought Of one other thing, might be worth looking in the car manual to see what the actual weight limit of the roof is, just in case the two kayaks will go over it.

Andrew

 

Great point, Andrew. If I remember correctly, it can support 165 lbs.