Can You Drill Through Thule Square Bars?

Can You Drill Through Thule Square Bars? Let’s Take a Look…

Yes you can drill through Thule square bars but caution is required not to compromise the integrity of the bars. Drilling must be as central through the bars as possible with the minimal amount of holes. For example, mounting our rifle box directly onto the bars required two holes in each bar with wooden blocks to brace the gun box internally for extra support.

The job itself is very simple but it pays to take your time, getting everything lined up correctly is crucial and it pays to measure your bars prior to drilling as one of ours was 20mm longer than the other.

The Thule square ‘Evo’ bars are made from steel and can be drilled easily, marking the holes takes some time and it helps to loosen the bars on both sides to allow for smaller adjustments.

We drilled our holes through the bars with bars still mounted on the Shogun – just to make sure everything married as we also have the Sunseeker III to mount on there too, as soon as the bars are moved adjustments need to be made for anything else they carry too.

2 Holes in each bar

We drilled two holes in each bar to accommodate straight through bolts, doing it this way avoids extra holes you’ll need to drill in the box itself if you’re using U bolts to clasp the bars from underneath. It’s personal preference but we decided that 4 holes in the box would be better than 8, bear in mind these Thule bars are cheap too, if we’d had Wingbars on things may have been different.

Simple Set Up

It’s a simple set up for straight forward simple roof bars, holes drilled and we work in a wooden brace [pallet wood] on each side to creat more purchase on the base of the box – you can shake the whole Shogun side to side puilling the box so it’s not going anywhere.

Read our review on this rifle box