So I went on a nice overlanding trip and had a great time until my stock roof rails started to pull away from the roof.

this was entirely my fault. I was overweight on the stock roof and with all the rocking and rolling rock trails if finally gave.

So here's what I did to fix it. Not pretty but it'll work.

First I removed the old rails. A couple of the nutserts spun with the bolts so they didn't want to move. This is fine and I was able to take care of that later on.




With the rail out of the way, I used a wire wheel to strip the paint surrounding the area.


Then I just welded a very small tac on one side of the nutsert. This is to keeps it from spinning which is how I could remove the bolt.

After that I took a footlong piece of angle steel, drilled a hole in the end and then using the stock torx bolts, attached it to the roof.



With the angle steel firmly attached, I slowly pulled it upward to bend the nutsert back to its straight position. It is very easy to bend it back into place. Which should be an indication of how weak that is as a mounting point.

after that, you can wire wheel it again, seal it, paint it, and you're good to go.

Lesson learned, don't put more than 80-100 lbs up there. Ever.

 

They are literally just nutserts into the roof steel, there is no structure below that they hold into. You could always run a thick steel strip along the inside of the roof and weld nuts to the back of it at the correct spots, however that wouldn't prevent the rails from breaking, just the roof from bending.

 

Yeah in another thread in the fab section of the forums I had been asking about that and the opinion seemed to be that while entirely possible to beef up the stock locations, with how effective and cheap gutter mounts are, it just didn't make a lot of sense from an effort perspective.

That said, if someone wanted to, my thoughts are:
-drill out the original nutserts because they're kinda crap
-weld a new nut strip together using some right angle steel(more rigid than just a strip of flat), spaced to the original holes we drilled out.
-tac that to the roof from the inside
-weld two additional lengths of angle steel as cross beams between your new nut strips so the weight of whatever is up there doesn't try to spread it apart like it did here
-and then get some aftermarket rails that are tougher otherwise what's the point.

Again. Way harder than the gutter but once said and done it might very well be stronger than the gutter mounts. But for $60 for a six pack of gutter mounts, I didn't feel like finding out.