Heres a detailed explanation about how I got my 589 fork mount trays on my 2003 MP5, so hopefully it should answer some questions about getting a rack on our cars. Points to note: If you use the Thule 889/899 kit with the spacer on the back instead of a load bar your tray will sit about a lower in the back and it looks kinda gay. It just undoes the the low front end, high rear end, muscular, aggressive look of the car. Also you wont be able to use a ski carrier because the back carrier wont have a Thule load bar to sit on, it would be lower in the back and all weird. The load bar included in the 889/899 pack is only 31 long . If you only need to carry one bike youll be okay but if you want to get two trays on the load bar youd have to mount them kinda inboard, so theyd be hard to reach if youre short like me. I bought the parts bags seperately for about $35 and used the Thule bars that I already had for my setup.
I already had a full Thule setup from my last car but the 400 feet were useless because the track that the factory crossbars run in is totally in the way of the feet and Thule doesnt make a Tracker kit that fits the tracks so I was forced to use the factory crossbars. The big problem was that the factory crossbars are way too far back on the roof so pretty much anything that you put on the roof is going to hit the spoiler when you open up up the hatch so theres one obstacle to conquer. The other big thing is the shape of the factory crossbars. The 589 will only mount to square Thule or round Yakima bars. The only option was to mount my Thule load bars to the factory crossbars and then cut the 589 trays short enough so that they wont hit the wing.
So heres what I did: I cut my Thule load bars down to about 40 so they dont stick out too far and I mounted them to the factory crossbars using Thule part # 853-5267 clamps and the associated parts. I did have to grind away part of the clamp to match the profile of the factory bars because the clamps werent quite large enough, or the screws werent quite long enough depending on how you want to look at it. The next part was to cut down the trays for spoiler clearance. If I cut the back of the tray I was going to have to machine out about five odd shaped holes where the plastic end cap snapped in and that was going to be a pain so I decided to detach the tray from the head and cut that end with a miter saw with a metal blade so I would only have to drill the one 5/16 hole for the single bolt that holds the head to the tray. Much easier. I think that I had to lop about 6 off of the tray. Once I got that reassembled the rest of the installation is as expected.
Heres a link to the Thule site where you can get the part numbers for the small parts that you may need. Any shop can order these.
http://www.thuleracks.com/thule/product_spare2.asp?dept_id=8&sku=889
Hey Mazda, please stop using a roof rack system alltogether. We all would prefer to use a regular system such as the Thule 400 feet. The rack would be much further forward on the vehicle so we could actually carry stuff and best of all we could run a fairing which looks pretty sweet
) soon and get a Yakima MightyJoe.
