Today is Halloween, and our HCH is now with us ONE YEAR! Of course, since the car is white, his name is Casper.
To celebrate his birthday, I bought a Trunk Hook at my local dealership (Beaverton, OR) for just under $9, using an expired dealer coupon they'd sent me.
Forgive me for not having included a picture, but here's my review: It's black molded plastic, with three upcurving hooks that should hold shopping bags just fine.
It came with all sorts of warnings, including
death (perfect for 10/31!) should one misuse the product (towing skateboarders, or securing a victim to the trunk hook by the neck?), and a warning that the load limit is SIX POUNDS, but no instructions or pictures at all. When I do mechanical work, it's dangerous enough
with instructions, worse without.
So here's the deal: the hook assembly has kind of a recessed socket in the middle, and there's a bolt, an elongated nut, a washer, and a lock washer. So....I stuck the bolt into the socket's hole, and with my finger behind the socket, pushed the hanger up through one of the holes in the bar at the top of the trunk, and worked toward getting the nut onto it from within that tiny space inside the beam, thinking all the while that I wish I had tiny, dextrous, Japanese fingers, which my wonderful oral surgeon (she's cute, incidentally) is blessed with.
I managed to lose the nut in that beam, & since I unwisely was doing this parked by my dealer, I just said to heck with that and drove home. While trying to recover the nut, I found it went down into the compartment inside the left rear fender, and I'll only hope it doesn't become my car's first rattle.
Then it came to me: duh! The elongated nut goes in the column, and the bolt is pushed down through a hole, and they meet. (Incidentally, the hook assembly has a small finger-y thing that helps keep it from rotating, which fits into an adjoining hole in the beam.) Well, I did the equivalent using a metric nut I had at home, with a drive socket temporarily attached. I used some Loc-tite so it wouldn't slip, and the hook seems solid enough.
I haven't yet tried the hook with loaded grocery bags, but I think either the cloth or plastic bags should work fine with this. It definitely seems sturdy enough to hold a couple of bags of groceries, particularly if they are resting on the floor and this just keeps the bottles from crashing into the eggs.
There's my first review here! Incidentally, we're happy with Casper. A few weeks ago, we went up from Portland to Seattle to visit friends, drove around in Seattle, and drove home. 52 MPG. Last week, we went up to Sisters, OR to visit other friends. The mountains were tough on mileage: 48 MPG. My license plate frame says: "CAUTION: Smug Emissions!"
New Accessory: Trunk Hooks!!!
Retired
