Howdy,

I have a WRX Wagon coming in April 15, and I'm trying to figure out the whole Subaru vs Yakima rack thing. I have a lot of Yakima attachments from my old car that I would like to use on my WRX including two different kayak holders. Yakima makes adapters to fit my attachments to the flat Subaru cross bars, but Yakima says the flat Subaru cross bars will not support one or especially two 60 lb. kayaks.

Subaru also offers a round cross bar set that looks a lot like a Yakima, but the pics are two small to tell! I wrote SOA but no reply yet. Dealer is clueless and didn't have any to show me.

Does anyone know if the Subaru round cross bar and towers are Yakima? If not, do you know the diameter of the bars? Yakima is 1 1/8". My old Yakima tower had this expensive (and now useless to me) expensive extending attachment for a two door car and I found someone to buy the whle thing off of me, so it's either buy the rack from Subaru or go back to Yakima.

I probably could have asked this question with far fewer words!

Yes SOA uses Yakima parts. Why not, Yakima is the best racking going. http://www.i-club.com/ubb-files/smilies/smile.gif

Eric

Eric, thanks for the speedy reply! This is exactly what I wanted to hear.

You are right - Yakima makes great stuff. I went back and forth with Thule and Yakima, but was glad I purchased the Yakima.

All aftermarket rack companies say that the factory racks can't support more than some trivial amount of weight, but I would trust what Subaru says about the limits a little more (if they say anything, that is).

On the other hand, I haven't heard about anybody unhappy with either a Yakima or Thule setup.

deke - Go to REI or some rack specialty store. They'll have Yakima adapters that skide in the stock rails and they're probably going to be cheaper than anything from the dealer. At REI at least you get money back.