Van Tech Roof Rails
Roof rack selection
A quick note about choosing roof racks. I personally didn’t really see a need for a dance floor on my roof; I just wanted some simple rails – similar to the factory rails – to mount my solar panels, awning, and maybe some off-road lights. I found the MB factory racks to be ridiculously expensive for simple extruded aluminum, so I ordered up the Van Tech rails from EuroCampers.com. Everything came as described and was well packaged. Unfortunately, I had a few issues with mounting them on my 2019 144 high-roof which I’ll get into later.
Mounting Prep
The Van Tech roof rails come with sealing tape, bolts and nuts and connectors. Each side has two sections and they are pre-drilled to match the factory mounting points on the Sprinter.
The factory mounting locations on the Sprinter roof are sealed with plastic caps that are glued in place. These can be removed by softening the glue with some a heat gun. The plugs can then be either pried up from the top of the roof or pushed up from inside the van. I preferred the latter as it reduced the chance of accidentally scraping the paint on roof.
Issues
I did a test fit of the rails to ensure I had the proper orientation and that the holes in the rails were lining up with the roof holes. I noticed that that the front rails had a decent distance from the front end to the first bolt. I decided to augment this space with some VHB Acrylic tape. I applied the weather stripping that was provided to remainder of the rails.
I found when the rails were mounted using just the factory bolt locations, the ends of the rear rails did not fit flush with the rear of the van; they were actually suspended by about 1/4-1/2″ above the roof after the existing mounting bolts were all tightened. Therefore, I drilled additional mounting holes in the van roof to match the “optional” aft bolt holes in the rear rails. This pulled things into place, but it seemed a bit sketchy to have to bend the rail into shape like this. This photo from the inside of the van shows the rearmost mounting location with the “optional” hole.
I sealed all bolt holes with butyl tape since I didn’t trust using the factory weatherstripping alone. As with anything I cut or drilled, I treated the bare metal edge of the hole with POR 15.
Metal brackets are provided by Van Tech for aligning the front and rear rails. Unfortunately, these weren’t quite up to the task and didn’t hold the rails in alignment. So, I drilled addition bolt holes near the front of the rear rails near where the two rails meet. (It’s the bottom hole in the photo.) The photo shows how much they were mis-aligned – before I put the bolt in place and pulled the rails into alignment.) There’s plenty of clearance inside the roof for these additional holes (one in each rear rail). It’s not a difficult task and really shouldn’t have to be done. Nevertheless, I’d definitely recommend doing it.
Summary
Although I think these rails will be plenty durable for my needs, I question whether I can recommend them. If you think of them as simply raw material that you can craft into a roof rack, these would be fine. Then again, I have nothing to compare to since I have yet to install a factory rack; though I have to assume that the factory rails would be a cleaner install. After installing these, I have also contemplated using powder-coated struts for roof rails as these would also be way beefier than the extruded aluminum and you can mount pretty much anything to them.
