I installed a bed-extender in my 2018 Honda Ridgeline .
So that’s a ridgeline as you all know ridgeline is a dual cab short little box just over five feet of bed space that becomes a bit of a problem when you want to take well the 10 foot’s doable 13 foot kayak that’s a bit of a trouble so i decided that it it was time to buy a bed extender this is the t-bar that goes off for your trailer hitch this one’s by towing
Master i got it from princess auto they had it on sale at the time ten dollars off knocked it down to fifty dollars showed up in two days by pure later and yes i’m in ontario canada so this is a bit of an unboxing an initial impression of the bed extender from towing master it is the cheaper variety there are versions out there that are upwards of 170 and over
200 dollars there are some slight differences if you notice this t-bar is absolutely straight right along here there are some reports that if you’re on an incline that can actually bottom out so some of the more expensive ones are hinged with a pin here or angled and they come up on another 20 degrees or so knocking a little bit of this corner off so that you
Have a little more access if you have a ramp to your driveway or you’re in very hilly terrain when you’re using it we’ll see how it goes i’ve got a bit of a ramp in my driveway and i’ve hit trailer hitches that are six inch drops before so we’ll uh we’ll see how it goes i also expect the paint quality on this cheaper version will be suspect but i’m not above
Putting a coat of chem clad on it and uh making that work so that’s what you get in the box instructions basically as you can tell me it has a reading capacity of 350 pounds and don’t do anything stupid with it you end up with one pin so hopefully you own the pin that goes into your receiver because this is the pin that locks the t-bar to the extension it’s
Pretty simple two pieces now obviously you can put the t-bar on the short end or you can put the t-bar on the tall end having a sticking out roughly a foot but now you can have something that is as tall as your roof and if you have rails on your roof then you can have your item kayak or canoe in this case uh kayak going off the top rail of your uh cab and then
Extending over your bed and onto the t-bar i won’t be using it like that because my truck does not have any kind of rails on the roof and like i said you got intended use store it when it’s not in use and secure place away from children operating safety carrying any load can be hazardous tie it down rack use and care don’t overfill it it doesn’t have a capacity
Of 350 pounds don’t let children play around with the rack it’s not a toy store in a dry secure place assembly come on if you can’t figure this out you shouldn’t be driving a car and there’s the other option that’s talking about how you can make it taller and then carry something on your roof and have it extend out onto this as you can see it fits in like any
Other tongue that goes into your receiver and the pins go right through there is a single hole on this vertical extension the adjustability is in these five holes spaced roughly two inches apart it does come with one reflector in order to figure out where to adjust the pin to for level i just took my kayak paddle stuck out the back of the truck and made it
Come up that’s level enough for me with the tailgate down this truck bed is just shy of seven feet which means on my ten footer i’d have ten or three feet of kayak sticking out i’m right at the ten foot mark with the bed extender on the truck which means you’ll still have three feet kayak which is roughly where i’m standing now sticking out there’s nothing
That’s going to indicate to a car coming from the side that there’s at night there’s something here so i’m going to put reflectors orange ones there yellow and some kind of red on the edges of the t-bars about these rhino racks because you can do pool noodles but that bar is over two inches thick you’re going to be cutting your pool noodles and strapping them
Down with some kind of zip tie i’m just going to take these old rhino racks you’re a little thicker a little more durable unfortunately it came off with something that had a one inch bar so that velcro will not work on something that is two and a half by two and a half so it’s going to get zip tied too okay so i put orange reflectors on the ends what might
Work out better these lights the same ones that the tow trucks use to stick on your car when they’re towing it they’re magnetically pretty strong attached to the bar and then when i tied the pads down with zip ties that is also tied in the electrical so it’s going nowhere it’s rather permanent but it’s going nowhere i do have about eight feet of extra wire
Here that i bundled up and just duct taped wrapped it around as well so it’s not going anywhere the reason i want to keep it is you never know where your wear points are so i ran it through a tube that i’ve used to tie down i don’t know if it’s necessary but it keeps friction from cutting through the wire and now if i need to splice something i’ve got eight
Feet of wire that i can just splice back into whether it be the female end that dies or my connection or wear through due to friction either way i should have it covered so there you have it 13 foot kayak sticking out of the back of a honda ridgeline i’ll probably be hanging a red flag off the end of this rudder as well simply because that’s the part
That people aren’t going to be looking at i’m going to go right up on somebody’s hood there at the bottom end of the driveway it’s getting close we’re at two inches of clearance but it’s clearing and as promised the 10-foot malibu doesn’t need the rack put a cooler in there there’s some other luggage and it’ll work just fine and that’s it for an unboxing
Installation and modification of the tow master that extender thanks for watching
Transcribed from video
Kayak in a Honda Ridgeline pickup truck By Hammerdak
