Kuat Grip Slide Out Ski and Snowboard Carrier Review
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Review of the Kuat Grip Slide Out Ski and Snowboard Carrier
Hey, everyone. Today we're gonna be taking a look at the Kuat Grip Slideout Ski and Snowboard Carrier. This is a great accessory for your vehicle, and will allow you to haul your skis and snowboards to and from the slopes. Now we have two different sizes available. We have the larger of the two sizes on our roof rack right now. This is gonna be able to haul up to six sets of skis or four boards, or just a combination of both like you see we have on it right now.
But if you don't quite need all of that capacity, you can get the smaller size, which will haul up to four sets of skis or two snowboards. It's available in the colors black, gray and pearl. Just see etrailer.com for whatever color fits your vehicle best.Now I've gone ahead and gotten each color installed on the vehicle with the appropriate color, just to show you how Kuat went that extra mile to make sure your racks not only work well, but they're also gonna look good on your vehicle. Let's come over here and take a closer look at each one. Because the gray and the black can be a little bit deceiving from afar.
Right here we have our black vehicle and our black Kuat Grip Ski and Snowboard Carrier. You're gonna see that they did a great job of just matching the color scheme. We all know that black is a very popular color when it comes to choosing your vehicle.Now we come over here to the gray, so you can get a closer look at it. One of the differences with the gray one, when compared to the other two, is they have that orange strip on the bottom, which isn't too noticeable, but it does add to the style of it. Again, great job what they did of matching the gray to the gray of our vehicle right here.
My personal favorite is how they found this pearl-white carrier, and they got it to match perfectly with our pearl-white vehicle. If I'm being honest, if I had a pearl-white vehicle, and I wanted a ski and snowboard carrier, they're the only ones that offer it in that color. So not only am I gonna be able to haul my skis and snowboards up and down the mountain, but I'm also gonna look good doing it.Now in my opinion, what sets this carrier apart from its competitors is how user-friendly it is. To start, with this very large opening with a handle on it, that even with my large gloves on, I can still open and close the carrier with ease. When we wanna unload our skis, or even load them up, it has a spring-loaded system on the other side, so we can just push up on the handle, and it's gonna fly open like so.
We'll do that to both sides.Now if you notice, our snowboard is on the complete other side of our vehicle right now. So especially for someone with a height restriction like myself, it's gonna be very hard to access over there. Luckily, Kuat has solves this problem. All we gotta do is pull on these tabs that are on the inside on both of the carriers, and we can just pull that snowboard all the way over to us. So now I have complete access to the other side of the carrier. This feature is gonna decrease the time that you take to load and unload your skis.Now when you have all your gear loaded, it's as easy as just pushing the rack back to its original spot, and then close your carrier. As I close my carrier, you can notice that the grip-locked teeth right here, which are made out of rubber, mold to the surface of our skis and snowboards to account for their thickness and to help secure them. We also are gonna have three different latches on this system right here. That's gonna account for different thicknesses of our loads.If you have it fully loaded, and you've got some pretty thick skis and snowboards, and you can only get it to the first latch, that's completely fine. But I would advise it's in your best interest to see how far you can latch it. We'll go ahead and go to the second one. Right there, we see that it's pretty secure. Now if we try to go to the third latch, which is as far as it can go, it works, but it does bow our carrier just a bit, so we're just gonna take it off, and go back to the second one. And you can still see that our skis are very secure. I can't move them at all.We do have this lock right here, that we can push over, and lock our handle in place to whatever latch we have secured. And from there, we'll come to the other side, and take our included keys, and we'll lock it into place so that even our lock handle cannot be accessed. They've also engineered the hinge on the other side of the rack to adjust for the load so it doesn't put any extra pressure on the innermost gear that you have. You can see right here as I pull down on it, that it is adjustable for whatever load. As you can see with the carrier completely empty, our hinge has gone back to its original position. Now with the load that we have on our vehicle right now, we still are gonna have access to our truck without it making contact. However, you do wanna keep in mind that depending on the crossbar spread you have, or the length of your skis and snowboards, you may or may not have access to your truck, and also it just depends on the vehicle.Now whether the carrier is loaded or unloaded, it's gonna have a very low profile design, which is gonna add to the looks of your vehicle. It's gonna use four of these flip mounts, two for each carrier, to mount to the crossbar. It has a rubber-coated steel strap that comes under our crossbar, and mounts into this pivot lock. It's gonna fit your arrow bars, round bars, square bars, and most factory roof racks. When you're done, we do have this lock right here that uses the same key for the other lock as well.When you have all your straps secured, due to various roof slopes and crossbar types, you can adjust the carrier either way to make sure that it's level so that when you secure your skis and snowboards, you're gonna ensure that they're level and they're not pulling on one side. Then when you have that in your location that you want it, you just tighten down the bolt right here to make sure it's locked into place. Now if you would rather mount your grip ski to the T-slot on your crossbar, you can pick up the Kuat T-channel adaptor kit here at etrailer.com. And that'll replace this bolt right here and the flip mounts with a T-slot adapter, so that you can mount it directly to your crossbar.Now from the top of our crossbar to the top of our carrier, we've added about 4-1/2" to the top of our vehicle. This is important to keep in mind for any low clearance situations such as parking in your garage. The metal outer shell is gonna be very durable and corrosion resistant. Now both the six-ski and the four-ski are gonna have a total weigh capacity of 165 pounds, but you do wanna be sure to double check with your vehicle's owner manual and the owner's manual of your roof rack to make sure that both can handle that weight.With that being said, that's gonna do it for our look at Kuat's line of Grip Ski and Snowboard Carriers.
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