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Full transcript: www.etrailer.c...
AJ: What's up, everybody. It's AJ with etrailer.com. Today, when we're going to be checking out the Thule Tram. This is a ski and snowboard carrier that goes onto your existing bike rack. So it's going to sit in the cradles of our Thule hanging style bike rack and then allow us to carry these skis and snowboards. Let's check it out.
So it may seem like an unorthodox way of carrying your skis and snowboard, but it's actually pretty practical. If you already have the bike rack and the hitch on your vehicle, you just throw this on top of there and you can carry them. It beats buying a roof rack system, then the ski and snowboard carriers separately, installing those every time you go to do this. It's much easier to just throw a bike rack in, throw this on top, strap it in, and go.Not to mention, if you already have a roof box and a roof rack on your vehicle, you don't have to decide if, "Hey, do I want to carry the skis and snowboards up there or stuff the luggage in here" You can actually have the box on there loaded with your luggage, keep all your room in your vehicle because you're going to have your skis and snowboards out here on the outside. Also, makes it easier when you're loading up the skis and snowboards.
Instead of opening the door, hopping up there, loading it in the box and try and reach up there and get it or getting a step to do that, you can easily load it right here from waist level, set up, and go. So before I show you how it works, let's make sure it works for you. I'm going to measure from the center of this cradle, this cradle so we can get the spacing. It looks like it's about five and a half inches apart. So that's something to keep in mind.
If you already have a bike rack, you want those cradles five and a half inches apart so this fits in there.And most hanging styles allow you to adjust the cradle so you can move them and get it to fit that. Let's see how it operates. Got a locking system right here so you can lock these closed so nobody can mess with them when you're not around, secures your skis and snowboards. You can also get a cable lock with this, and it'll work in wrap around so that nobody can take this off the bike rack as well, if you want to, but that's sold separately. Another option with the lock is you can get it keyed alike.
So if you do have a Thule box on your roof, you can get all the same cords and same keys so you only have to use one. You don't have to have like five keys in your pocket just on lock all your accessories. Once it's unlocked, all you have to do is push this big button here, which is big enough so that if you do have gloves on, you're going to hit it with your palm and it pops open.Stays open on its own. Now you will notice that I don't have to hold onto the skis and snowboards when I'm loading it or unloading, it's got this down here, just kind of puts pressure on both sides and will catch the bindings on there. That way you don't have to have one hand holding the ski here or the snowboard here and then you're loading this ski up and you got to try and close this while trying to bear hug it and get it closed. You can let it go, get them placed, where you want to, and then just close it and lock it up. Another thing I want to point out is the bindings on the skis. Every ski is going to be a little bit different, so it does depend on your binding. Clearly, I can't leave it like this. I'm not going to shut it on the front of these bindings, so I will have to lift it up a little bit. And that's why I'm not doing them back to back. It'll be too thick. I don't want to push that or damage the bindings at all. So I'll just kind of lift them up a little bit, about there. It looks like it's a better point for it to close down on. And I do have to hold it with my forearm a little bit. That's not that bad. And then I'll go ahead and close the arm.So it's not that bad, but just pointing that out. That's why we weren't doubling them back to back because it won't fit. It's too thick. But it fits like this just fine. Thule says that it holds up to four snowboards or six skis. You can see that's not necessarily the case here. I mean, I guess it depends on what gear you have, but you can see the snowboard takes up more than half of this carrier here. And the only way we got in to the skis is because we could double them up like this because the bindings we're thin enough to do that. As you saw earlier, we can't do that on this s