Malone Big Foot Pro Universal Car Rack Canoe Carrier with Bow and Stern Lines

I was hesitant to purchase this Big Foot Canoe Carrier as I have a Honda Odyssey (2002) and I see how others have had issues on fitting this to their vehicle. I have OEM crossbars and a Coleman Canoe that had to mesh with this carrier. It did very well with a little work. This carrier is actually 4 attachments that you can adjust anywhere on your crossbars and have 2 different sized bolts to fit thin or thicker crossbars and cool holders that the nuts are encased in to help you tighten and loosen the nuts by hand very easily.I had to fit 2 of the carrier attachments on the rear crossbar in the 'normal' positions or aka, the thinner part of the crossbar. On the front crossbar, I had to attach the carrier attachments to the fatter part of the crossbar where the crossbar is joined to the side rail at the farthest point. It took some maneuvering once the canoe was on the crossbars to get everything aligned, but it worked like a charm. I used the longer bolts and it tightened fine with room to spare. It is a tighter fit to get your hand in to tighten the nuts this way, but other than removing and hoisting back up the canoe, it was slow but worked in the end. The canoe slid easily over the attachments for the short distance I needed to move it. I am 5'7" and my wife is 5'0" so it is a bit of a reach to get it perfect, though we were somewhat close.The hard part on this carrier is when you are as short as both of us are and you have to heave a canoe not only onto the top of the van but also the extra few inches to get over the carrier attachments. It is tip toe time.The carrier attachments are well made and should last for years. These replace my Yakima foam pads that worked well for a year but are now falling apart. I am frugal and do not wish to pay a few hundred dollars for a specialized rack/carrier for our canoe and as long as this carrier performs as I feel it well, it is money well spent. Yes, it costs more compared to the foam pads ($40) at twice the price but I feel they will last several years longer. The attachments are polycarbon which feel and look like high end hard molded plastic (similar to some of the DJ lighting attachments for my DJ lighting that have lasted for many years and still going strong) and the insides are like a hard rubber material that can take a little abuse but not scuff up your canoe. The holders that the nuts are enclosed in seem to also be made of the same polycarbon material. The part that the top attachment attaches to under the crossbars are rubbery covered heavy metal shaped pieces that fit both the thicker part of my crossbars as well as the thinner areas.I am a bit nervous on overtightening the racks as I do not want to strip the bolts and the fancy nut holders that the nuts are encased in. The nut holders cover the nuts and are built in. They work very well and easy for hand tightening the carrier to the crossbars.The straps work ok, but admit, i use my own to strap the bow and stern of canoe to my van and i also use a couple of tie downs from side to side in mid point areas of canoe. This sucker is not budging off the van until I am ready - LOL.I would recommend the Malone Big Foot Pro Universal Car Rack Carrier to anyone with a canoe and you don't want to spend a fortune on a rack/mounts. There is no way to know if it fits your vehicle / rack until you try it or read others reviews. I bought it hoping they would work and if they did not, Amazon has a good return policy. I was fortunate and this carrier fit my '02 Odyssey and OEM roof crossbars.

I generally don't write reviews for products. I am an avid Adirondack wilderness camper. Kudos to Malone. I just bought a used canoe. I have always carried kayaks with my Thule racks, but Thule has not come up with conversion hardware for my 2021 Toyota Venza. So I bought the Toyota racks for the Venza and then ordered the Malone Big Foot Pro. Installation was easy. Quality was great. I hauled my canoe from the Adirondacks to home (about 250 miles) this week. Canoe stayed in place. The gunwale brackets (and hardware), jawz brackets and load straps were all very good quality. Thank you Malone.

I love these but my biggest complaint was I had to spend another 15 dollars to buy a huge pack of t bolts. They should be included for the price.

This is an outstanding product. Used as designed, the width was about 1-inch too small for my canoe. But the "clamp" is adjustable enough to slip over the end bracket of the roof rack bar, and in my case it fit. I think that in most cases it can be made to fit. However, it is very hard to be sure before buying it and trying it out. Hopefully the vendor will accept returns if it does not. (Note. After hooking up everything, I realized that in place on my RVm none of the "ties" held the canoe against sliding forward in a sudden stop. This was because the canoe bow was NOT forward of the front of the car. I remedied this by tying the bow of the canoe to the roof rack. Also, I had terrible buzzing from the straps vibrating. I had 25oo miles to go and had to fix it. I replaced the straps provided with ratchet straps, and then I stabilized them by attaching wires at several places to damp the vibrations.) When all was well and done, the attachment was "perfect". I drove 2500 miles and it might as well not have been there as there was no sound, no wind pressure, no loss of mileage.

Easy to install works great!

We are going on a road trip from CO to Lake of the Ozarks in MO. I wanted a more secure way to haul the canoe 2k miles through Kansas winds. Received the brackets from Amazon yesterday and had them installed and canoe mounted in less than an hour. I have an Acura MDX with factory cross bars. I was worried about this fitting.BEFORE I purchased the product, I put the canoe on top and measured the space available on either side of the canoe for the mounts to make sure it would work. The measurements were going to be tight, so I flipped a coin and bought the brackets. The description states that the mounts are 5" wide, but the clamp that bolts to the underside of the bracket is 1.5" wide and allows the bracket to hang over the Acura's crossbar mounts and inch or two. This saved my skin. There was very little wiggle room. BUT it works and it looks nice. The canoe is very secure. The straps that accompany the kit are of good quality.I do not like a single line on the bow since it does not give good side-to-side control (even though the brackets provide fantastic side-to-side control--something I'll have to get used to), so I modified the ropes to attach triangle style to the inside of the hood.This product--although probably overkill--gives me much more peace of mind hauling the canoe long distances with high winds.

I had to haul an old Grumman canoe 350 miles, mostly on highway, and was worried about the aerodynamics, but this worked fine. There was no evidence of movement, even at 65mph. The straps made noise at the start, but I wrapped them tightly around the rack supports and that made the noise disappear.I subtracted 1 star because of minor quality control issues. One of the bolts had plastic coating the bolt threads. It took me a while to figure out that I could use a screwdriver to scrape out the extra plastic. And a couple of bolts were missing, which was a minor nuisance since they include bolts in two sizes in the package.The canoe barely fit my Mazda CX-5; a wider canoe or narrower car would be a problem.

Box it came in was open and missing most parts for the kit. Very disappointed as we have been waiting on this kit and now have to go through returns and wait again.

They do exactly what they are supposed to, hold the canoe steady and firmly.

Sturdy design, easy to fit