Roof box and roof bars how-to

Jim Blackstock shows how to fit a set of roof bars and a roof box

Sometimes, the boot of the car and the storage space inside the caravan simply isn’t enough to carry everything you need to take with you. In this case, what do you do? Well, you could fit a roof box.

A roof box will house a huge amount of equipment – both in terms of volume and weight – and is particularly useful if you want to be able to access something without having to unpack the car or the caravan. For example, an awning springs immediately to mind – arriving on site, I like to be able to get the caravan set up and the awning up as well without having to actually get inside the caravan or unpack the car, just in case it’s chucking it down.

Of course, it’s not just a luggage box you can carry on a pair of roof bars, even though that’s what we’ve shown how to fit here. Bike racks, as we have discussed before, can also be mounted on the bars, as can boat or canoe racks, for example. And they can be really useful for noncaravanning clobber as well, such as carrying ladders.

Fitting a pair of roof bars then a roof box is not a technically difficult job but there are a couple of aspects that need some attention to make sure you get it right and can use that additional storage safely and easily for as long as you want.

We decided to show how to fit a pair of roof bars and an Advanced 470-litre roof box from Halfords. There can’t be anyone in the country who isn’t more than a few minutes’ drive from a branch of Halfords and if you don’t fancy fitting it yourself, its fitters will do it for you.

11 Now you’ll need your helper. We positioned the box on the bars but to one side at this stage, as we needed to locate the bars fore and aft on the car’s rails to get the right positions before locating the box properly

6 With the mounts loosely tightened, it was time to get the box out. The 470-litre Advanced box is large but not ungainly, though it does need two people to lift it into place – you’ll need a helper shortly

1 The first step is to loosely lay the bars across the roof of the car to make sure you have the right size and fittings. Halfords has a range of all types of bars. Our Volvo XC90 uses familiar raised rails

Starting at the back, we tightened the clamps onto the roof bars. The locking mechanism is a simple twistlock so you keep turning until the clamps go tight on the roof bars 16

BELOW LEFT Roof bar BELOW RIGHT Roof box

22 If you don’t fancy fitting it yourself, then Halfords’ technicians can fit the roof bars, the box or both for you. Prices start at £15 – go to W halfords.com to find your nearest store and for more information

21 The box will take 75kg and comes with straps to stop the contents moving in use. Just remember it’s there when you’ve unhitched, though – no drivethrough car washes or low multi-storey car parks!

13 Before going any further, we needed to open the tailgate and check that it didn’t foul on the bar or the box at the rear of the car. The Volvo’s design means that there is plenty of clearance with it open

15 We then needed to sit the box in the centre of the car so that we could start to tighten everything down. If you really want, you could use a tape measure but for us, a pair of eyes was plenty accurate

14 With the rear roof bar in the right position, it was clear that the front was way out. So we undid the clamping bolts on the mount at each side and slid the bar back until it sat in the right place for the box’s clamps

12 We started by locating the rear mounts of the box on to the rearmost rail that we fitted. We left the clamps open at this stage as we knew we would probably have to move one or both bars to fit the box right

19 Depending on the size of your car, loading a roof box can be tricky but we found this on t’internet; it’s an alloy step that hangs off a door-lock bracket and makes it easy to get up to the box

20 Even without the alloy step, it is fairly easy to load and unload just standing on the edge of the car’s doors, as the box will open to either side and you can lean in far enough to get to what you need

18 Once we were happy with the roof box fixing to the bars, we tightened the clamps on the front bars and fitted the plastic end covers (they insert and twist-lock with the Allen key) that finish it off

9 The mounts that fit to the roof bars are like claws, one on either side of the box and two on each side, front and rear. This is them done up as far as they will go, as they arrived in the box

10 Clearly they need to be released before they can be attached to the roof rails. The knobs inside the box move the whole mount forwards and backwards, and also, open and close the clamps

7 The box has a lock on either side, so it can be loaded and unloaded from both sides of the car, though not at once. Opening arms allow it to pivot on each side depending on which side is unlocked

8 The mounts that attach to the roof bars have a good amount of adjustment in them. We slid them as far forwards and as far back as we could, to get the longest mounting distance for optimum stability

2 Once we were satisfied they were the correct length, we aligned the brackets for the rear bar with the edge of the plastic panel on the Volvo’s roof that covers the various antennae

3 We then adjusted the brackets so that the bars sat centrally across the car and between the two mounts and double-checked that the mounts fitted our roof bars. As you can see, they did

4 The Halfords bar-mounts secure using a single hex-head bolt, using the Allen key supplied. The mounts are fitted with rubberised pads to prevent them from harming the paint or finish on the roof rails

5 Moving to the front of the car, we had to take a guesstimate where the front bar should sit, and so, we lined the mount up with the gap between the top of the front and rear doors, as a start point

17 We left the front-bar end mounts loose at this stage to make sure that the clamps fitted properly onto the roof bars before final fitting of the mounts to the rails