Mixing Thule with Yakima

I’ve got two Thule Glide and Sets on my vehicle and it’s worked for me for the last couple of years except… I keep having trouble with the front “set” part keeping the angle I’ve set it at. The tightening of the boat seems to flatten the angle. There is a screw which when tightened supposedly holds the angle you’ve set it at but the angle never holds and is always falling. I’ve tighted the screws to the point that I think I’ve split the knobs and they are now detached from the bold. So, I’m thinking at this point that I may need to either take them apart and replace parts or replace the unit completely. I’m just thinking that I’ll probably run into the same problem again. Any ideas you might have are welcomed but I was wondering about replacing the front part of my set up with Yakima Mako saddles and keeping my Thule “slides” for the back. Anyone ever try this? Any reason this wouldn’t work? Thanks for your input.

Thule / Yakima
The Yakima parts come with a round hole (to fit the round Yakima bars.) But they have (or at least they used to have) a snap-out section that allowed them to be used on square bars which is what Thule uses. (The snap-out is/was a one-way conversion. You couldn’t put the snap-out back to use the parts on round bars again.)



OTOH, I’ve used Thule saddles on my Yakima bars for trips up to 100 miles, and everything has stayed together perfectly well. YMMV, of course.





Darryl

Thule Bolts
As I recall, the Thule bolts, and therefore the Thule nuts, are 10mm. I have had good luck with a couple of 10mm wrenches and double nuts, one jammed against the other to lock the two, instead of Thule hand nuts. The trip to the hardware store is probably less expensive than Yakima equipment.



Good luck,

Adrian

Great idea to replace the bolts.
Thanks for the advice. I saw on another discussion that someone swaped out all the hardware on their thule saddles to marine grade bolts. I think I may look into that as well. With the price of these things I’m kind of surprised that Thule doesn’t use better quality parts.