Hey all,

First time poster, long time Nissan nut. In addition to the '05 XTerra I just added to my collection, I also have an '03 Sentra, a '95 Pathfinder, and a '69 Nissan Patrol. Oh, and a '66 Mustang, but that's another forum.

Anyway, hope the title isn't too misleading -- this isn't the 'official' Yakima / Nissan interior bike rack, but it is 99% real Yakima parts. I just purchased my '05 X last weekend (after like 5 years of wanting one) and, being impatient, couldn't wait for the official rack to come out. With my luck, the Nissan-branded one will now probably arrive any moment, so perhaps this expensive experiment will just hasten the official one for the rest of you.











I figured that Yakima made just about everything necessary I would need to cobble together a rack and mount it to the UtiliTrack, so I went to REI and spent about half an hour opening boxes and looking at stuff. This setup basically consists of some standard rail-mount risers, a standard Yakima crossbar, and the Yakima "Boa" fork-type mounts. You have to buy the front and back Boa pieces together, even though you only need the front. The risers are mounted using the plates that go with the XTerra D-Ring thingys -- the Yakima screws fit the plates just fine.

The Boa fork mounts are angled funny in these pictures because rotating the mounts backward on the bar lowers the clamp piece, which gives me just enough room to keep the bike's handlebars from hitting the roof.

All in all, it's a pretty expensive setup, north of $200 for all the parts. If I had it to do it over again, I would just buy the Boa mounts and mount the top half of them to a plank, which would itself be anchored to the UtiliTrack with some easy-to-remove knobs going through the plank into the Nissan D-ring plates. Make sense? It's more or less what others have done here, and would be extremely low-profile. I just had to go and get all fancy.

zieroh