Sherpak Smart Rack

The fine fellows from Seattle Sports sent us a Sherpak Smart Rack to review. This rack is designed to be temporalily installed on cars with or without factory or aftermarket racks.

Here a few reasons why the Sherpak Smart Rack is better than a permanent rack:

• Attaches and detaches within 2 minutes
• Easily attaches to factory installed racks
• Allows you to attach most after-market rack accessories like cargo boxes, ski carriers or kayak saddles to its built in rack bars
• Allows you to mount accessories to the rack while it’s easy to get to
• Allows you to keep the accessory boxes, bike racks, ski racks, etc permanently attached to the Smart Rack bars, so you don’t have to waste more time taking the attachments off.
• Increases your play time, by decreasing your rack mounting/dismounting time
• Saves $ – The combination basket/bar rack saves between $70 and $300 vs. high prices rack/basket combinations
• Attaches to vehicles with or without racks
• Splits in half for easy storage
• Compatible with most after market rack attachments
• Carbon steel construction with powder coated finish

With the help of my lovely assistant (not included with the rack), I installed the Sherpak Smart Rack on top of my Nissan Frontier Crew Cab.

Attaching the non-marring foam feet.

Rack ready to install

Front strapped down

Rear strapped down

Rack installed!

The rack was very easy to install, there is one drawback though:

The straps will run thru the inside of your vehicle. Not a big deal for short trips, but we’ll see how it holds up for the longer hauls. I have ordered some universal bike mounts for the rack, I will post updates as I use the racks for bike trips, snow trips and camping trips.