Mounting a hard shell RTT

Wallygator

Adventurer
Well my tent is on it's way and I need some advice since I have no experience with mounting a tent. I have a full length rack on a 4Runner with 10 cross bars in all. The tent is an aluminum hard shell with four mounting rails running the length of the tent.

Should I put down rubber on each cross bar of the rack (or the four tent rails) to dampen the connection between the tent and rack or just mount it directly to the rack?

I have heard rumors that these things can be noisy, is this true? Thinking this rubber could also protect the powder coating on the rack? Am I over thinking this?

Any other tips I need to know?

Thanks!
 
Last edited:

shoredreamer

Observer
What rack and what tent exactly? A very thin rubber strip shouldn’t hurt. If there are 10 crossbars and only 2 are clamped to the tent, there may be a chance of vibration between the remaining 8 bars.
 

Lemsteraak

Adventurer
I don't know much about the aluminum hard shelled tents because they are so new. We did a lot of tests on the fiberglass ones, specifically AutoHome tents, everything from crash tests to aerodynamics.

The aerodynamics of every vehicle is different so you may want tweak things a bit. Wind noise is bad, a disturbed air flow, like the noise you will hear whistling from standard Thule or Yakima bars. When you put the tent on, it should go away. If it doesn't, you may be able to move the tent or use a fairing or spoiler to quiet things down and make it more efficient. A big pile of bugs on the front of your tent also is an indicator that the airflow is bad. Again, moving the tent back or up may improve the flow. Since you can't see the wind, you can put telltales on your tent to see what the flow looks like, sort of like a crude wind tunnel. You like to see an attached flow in the forward section, namely the telltales are flat, not flopping. As the air flows over the surface, it will become separated from the shell and turbulent, which is fine, you might even want to induce turbulence. The telltales will help you see what the airflow looks like.

Here are a couple cases for example. Had a full sized pickup that had a lot of wind noise above 55, not a very aerodynamic vehicle. The tent also had a pile of bugs on the front so an indication air wasn't flowing well. Moving the tent back helped but what helped more was a lip spoiler on the front of the hood. Had a mid-sized SUV that had a lot of noise and handling issues at high speeds. It was an older non aerodynamic tent that was very wide. The sides of the tent stuck out a good foot past each side of the roof. We swapped the tent out for a slightly smaller aerodynamic tent and the problems went away and it felt like a new truck. Best we could figure was some sort of nasty end plate effect from the sides that were creating huge amounts of lift and drag.

You shouldn't get any squeaking from the tent. Some of the hard core off road guys would be concerned so we would "tension" the tent. The idea is to spring the tent slightly by adding or padding a third bar that raised the tent slightly higher in the middle, like 1/4 to 1/2 inch. When you tighten the tent down it would always be in slight tension so when the vehicle flexed, the tent would flex with it.

So, while there isn't any way to know how well your tent/vehicle combination will work in advance. Just be creative and if you have a problem, shouldn't be too hard to fix.
 

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