Ladder Rack Review from Harbor Freight (et al)

[crazy4offroad]

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I'm going to do a review of this ladder rack as a heads-up to others considering it. I've seen it for sale on several other websites and Amazon, and they're all identical. First, if you can't weld you may not want this. I'll have to disassemble some sections of it later and weld/ paint. If you can get a coupon code and get it closer to the $200 side it might be worth it.

The thickness of the pipe is about the same as exhaust pipe, or a child's swing set. I made the mistake of fully assembling it on the ground, hardware finger tight, and planning to just set it in place. I ended up practically disassembling the whole thing as I started trying to mount it to dad's truck (79 K10 fleet side short bed).

My original intention for this was to be able to haul 12' metal roofing and 10' 12' and 16' lumber. My dad's driveway has a switchback that would make using a trailer a real challenge. I went in knowing this is likely going to be Chinese garbage but maybe I can make it work. The front hoop has these foam pieces that I honestly can't understand their purpose, and ended up eliminating them.

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Their elimination was the result of having to remove the front hoop several times, trying to figure out the best location of the cross bar closest to the truck cab. In front of or behind the uprights? In front of or behind the small 1" pipe on the side bars? I finally settled with it here...

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To place it there required removal of the forward half of the side bars as well. If you have a nice truck you WILL end up scuffing your roof. Fortunately for me, dad's truck is a beater. The instructions are somewhat vague, since this is a universal mount ladder rack.

Another point of concern is going to be these so called "clamps" that join the front side bars to the rear side bars. Once fully tightened, metal-to-metal contact at the clamping point, the side bars can still potentially come apart with a load shift. Later I will eliminate these clamps and weld/ paint, as well as lighten the rack a little.

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One of the main things I take issue with is the supplied hardware. Don't let the zinc coating fool you. Chinese garbage. All of the hardware is individually packaged for whatever section you're working on. The large bolts, nuts and washers that attach the main uprights to the bed brackets I noticed had 1 nut that didn't match any of the others. Furthermore, there are no other bolts that accept a nut that size in any of the other hardware packages. I really don't understand where it came from.

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The bottom nut has a shorter profile than the top, and there's no other one like it in the whole kit. To expand on the poor quality of the hardware, one of the carriage bolts that hold the front hoop on got heavily galled threads from removing/ reinstalling, and I had to find a replacement because the nut stripped on the bolt.
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[crazy4offroad]

At the back of the rack are these side hoops that will come in handy getting up on the tailgate. When the front and rear side rails are installed together in their slip joints and clamped, these hoops are a good 3" from their bolt tabs, and have considerable spring tension on them, making them a real b!tch to get bolted.

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Next there's an intermediate cross bar to help support the load. It has clamping flanges that when you tighten the clamping bolts, the bar raises up.

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This is another part I'll have to take apart later and weld so it will be closer to level with the other bars.

Which leads me to my biggest gripe of this piece of Chinese sh!t. After everything was installed and tightened, it looks like a 30 year old sway-back mule.

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I started to get on the hood and push down on the front bar but I was concerned it would come apart at the clamps and bash the windshield or roof, and then I would have REALLY lost my sh!t. Anything else I do to try to straighten this out is going to have to wait for warmer weather. I don't even know if I can haul metal roofing on it without creasing/ bending it, and I don't know if I can haul a few hundred pounds of lumber on it safely without it coming apart mid span. "Haulmaster" HA! What a joke.

In closing, congratulations, China. You motherf*ckers. You gigged another American for a few hundred bucks for your substandard garbage.
ZERO out of 5 stars.

 

[animal]

Sorry Curt. I could not help but chuckle at the last sentence.

 

[crazy4offroad]

Sorry Curt. I could not help but chuckle at the last sentence.

No biggie, it's so bad it really is humorous. One other thing that was lacking in the kit. If you didn't want to permanently mount it to your bed, it has these jakey looking J-bolts that go through the little pieces of pipe welded to the bed brackets. I wouldn't trust these things to hold the rack onto the truck with no load at all on it. I tightened one down, realized what crap it was and took it back off, and all the zinc coating came off the threads of the bolts. So I opted to do the permanent bolt-on. Well they don't give you the bolts for that option. On a positive note, that's the strongest hardware in the whole assembly! If you look at some of the pics you can see minor scuffs and scratches from 2 weeks ago when I initially assembled it are already rusting. It has been sitting under a carport. I honestly don't expect this thing to last 2 years unless I do some major work to it to try to preserve it. China's high-sulfur coal and shoddy smelting of steel I think is purposeful, knowing good and well the end user will be junking this garbage in a few years, where I've seen DOM tubing racks last as long or longer than some of our squarebodies.

 

[crazy4offroad]

As an update to this, the other day my cousin and I stood on either side of the truck and pulled down on the front of the rack and not much force made the front and rear sections separate at the clamp. He suggested drilling and bolting them together at the clamp but I opted to seam weld them together and reinstalled the clamps since they may provide a tie-down spot. Hopefully this week I can get some lumber and metal to haul with it.

 

[Ricko1966]

Maybe you can haul some metal back on it and build a good ladder rack.Lol I just reread the title 800lb rack? And you and your cousin were too much? You must be some big boys.

As an update to this, the other day my cousin and I stood on either side of the truck and pulled down on the front of the rack and not much force made the front and rear sections separate at the clamp. He suggested drilling and bolting them together at the clamp but I opted to seam weld them together and reinstalled the clamps since they may provide a tie-down spot. Hopefully this week I can get some lumber and metal to haul with it.

 

[Grit dog]

On one hand I feel bad. It’s a reasonable expectation that it wouldnt be a complete pile of steaming ****.
But thank you for the colorful review! I feel like this every once in a while too when I buy something that basically couldn’t be worse than I expect but it is!
We all get had sometimes. Either trying to be cheap or only need something “once”.
I got a topsides creeper that’s like your ladder rack. First it wouldn’t fit over a truck bigger than I could reach everything from the ground or maybe a bucket.
Second in order for it to fit, it flexes about 30 degrees without strategic placed wood shims.
Third, it’s engineered to basically break as soon as you lay on it. I’m like 220lbs but not egregiously obese….lol. Looks 300% safer with my 150lb son on it.
It’s the shop tool equivalent of your ladder rack. A finely engineered 3rd world piece of equipment that is frankly more of a potential liability than an asset!