For the last two years I have had my Thule fork mount trays mounted to my factory load bars. Other than noticing the bike wobbling three weeks ago, I promptly tightened the hardware; the setup has worked rather well, until last night. I was driving home with my mountain bike on top. I turned onto my street and slowed down to drive over the gutter running down the main street. The gutter is rather large and deep and although I was driving very slowly, the speedometer may not have been registering; the motion of the vehicle traveling across caused the bike to tip over. I heard this slam on the roof and immediately pulled over and got out. That is when I discovered the nose of the tray had separated from the load bar. This is what I found.



You can see here where the bolt holding the nose in place pulled through the slot in the load bar.



Here is another shot:



So now I am back to the drawing board. I used all of the Thule hardware that came with both of the trays to attach them to the load bars, but as you can see the small piece of sheet metal used to fit into the T-slot is not strong enough and does not distribute the load well enough. Now I am off to find a new T-slot bolt.

 

Wow, in my book that's a potential safety related defect (bike separates completely and tumbles down freeway causing ???). I'd email Thule the pics and ask for free replacement parts FedX.

 

X2.....