Video Review & Installation

Ryan: The Bestop Trektop NX Glide in black twill is for those of you that have a 2007 to 2018 four door JK that are looking for a very unique aftermarket soft top. When you're shopping for a soft top, there are gonna be a couple different categories that you'll find. One is going to be a replacement soft top that will replace all the soft material and the windows if you already have a good working soft top frame. The other category is a complete replacement soft top, that's going to include all the hardware, all the frame mechanism, and the soft components. And then finally, you're gonna find tops like the one we're talking about today, which give you a little bit of a different style and function from a factory top, and most of those, if not all of them, will also include all the hardware because, again, it's not going to be similar to that factory hardware. This top is going to give you a different look and some different function from your factory top. And it's something that a lot of you are gonna be really interested in. This is a new top from Bestop. First of all, I'm gonna give it a one out of three wrenches for installation. This is going to bolt directly on to your Jeep. It's a very, very simple install, but we'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second. So what does this top provide you with? This is going to provide you with a fastback look also a completely convertible top so that you and front seat passenger as well as your rear seat passengers all can have that open-air driving experience, and because of the NX, all three of the rear windows get removed, so a ton of features here. Now, because this is a newer top, it has a ton of features. It does come with all of the hardware, and because it's the black twill material, which is the highest grade material available from Bestop, this is also going to be a very expensive top compared to almost any other top out there. But if you have the budget and you're looking for a top that offers all of these features, this is a great choice. So the way that this top is constructed is gonna be very different from a lot of the other ones out there, including a lot of the other Bestop Trektop and even the Trektop NX because this is the NX Glide. And the glide portion means that, again, the entire top from the front of the windshield all the way to behind the back seats does fold back. Now, that's gonna be different from your traditional Trektop NX that's just gonna have the Sunrider feature with the area over the driver and the front seat passenger flips back. Now, because this is a Trektop, it does have that slant fastback styling, and because it's an NX, it does have removable free windows in the rear of the Jeep. The windows slide in and out instead of zippering in and out like past tops. This makes it a lot easier to install the windows and you don't have to worry about any reliability issues with the zippers. So this gives you the options to have a lot of different configurations. You can leave the windows in and just lift the top back. Just remove the windows. Have the top still forward. When the top is up, you have that fastback Trektop styling, so again, a ton of different features. Now, from Bestop, you know you're gonna get a top that fits really well, because this is a non-factory style top, you know you're gonna get every single piece that you need to make this work on your Jeep. This isn't one of those where you purchase everything in the box and then you have to go out and buy X Y and Z separately. This comes with everything you need, it's very, very complete. And as I said before and as it says right in the title, this is Bestop's twill material. So this is going to be akin to premium material that you can get from Jeep on those newer JK's. So it's a very high quality material. It looks great. It's very quiet. It doesn't flap and it wears very, very well. So you're really getting the best of from function and build quality when you're getting this top. However, as I said, you are gonna pay a little bit more for it. This is one of the most expensive soft top that you can purchase. However, if you're looking for a tough that has a ton of features, some great style, and is going to wear very well because of the high build quality and the high quality materials, I think that the $1,400 price tag is worth it. Now, a member of the install team will show you how you get this installed on your Jeep.Man: First thing we're gonna do is remove our factory soft top. I'm gonna start off by removing both side windows and then the rear window. Next thing we're gonna do is unlatch the front header panel. So what we need to do is put down our sun visors, grab the latch and unlatch it. And we'll do the same thing on the other side here. All right. We're back on top. Now we can fold our factory soft top back. Now, once we get to this point, we can grab our latch right here, push down to release the back half of the soft top. I'm gonna have to do the same thing on the other side. We're just gonna push down on our latch here to release this. And now we can fold the rest of the soft top back. And to release the frame, we'll pull out on these two brackets right here. We'll do the same thing on the other side. All right. We can now lift the whole thing right off of the Jeep. Next thing we're gonna do is remove our door surrounds. To do that, we need to remove these three knobs right here. Simply unscrew them. And they are essentially a long bolt. We'll pull them right out. That's gonna take this piece off. And the rear door surround itself will now come out. We'll do the same thing on this side. Now, we'll remove all three knobs by unscrewing them.First thing we're gonna do for our installation is take our cable guide bracket and attach it to our door surround. We're gonna drop it in place here. And using the provided hardware, we're gonna use the M5 by 16 screws and nyloc nuts, come up from the bottom and then we'll get the nut started on this. Now, to get these tightened down, I'm gonna use an eight-millimeter socket and a Philips head tip on my drill. And we'll do the same thing for the right side bracket as well.First you put your cable support bracket in, followed by an M5 screw with a nyloc nut, and we'll get these tightened down now. If you guys don't have a drill, you can use a screwdriver. That's gonna work just fine. This is just gonna speed things up a little bit for your install. Once we got our cable guide bracket installed on our door surround, we can go ahead and fully install the door surround now. There's an alignment pin on the bottom here and a hole in the Jeep. You wanna get that in place. And we will loosely install one tightening knob here. Next up we have the front door rail. It's gonna install pretty much like the back door rail. Now, we have two knobs to put on this one. Now, when you open up your hardware pack, you're gonna have six knobs. Four of them are gonna be long. Two of them are gonna be short. The two short ones go in the center positions here. Now, I'm gonna get this installed loosely first. I'll come up front and get this guy installed loosely as well. Once you got all three started, then you can go ahead and tighten them down. Once you got all three of these tight, we can jump over to the other side. Do the same exact thing. We can now put our left side door surround in place. Make sure you line up your alignment pin right there with the hole in the Jeep. We can loosely install this knob here. Now we can install the front door rail same way as the other side. Again, the short knob goes in the center. Once you've got all three started, you can go through and tighten them all up now.Next thing we're gonna do is install the top arches. There are two of them. Make sure you're putting the front where the front goes. They are labeled with a little sticker on here. This says top arch front. The other one says rear. So we'll go ahead and slide this in its slot. It's gonna take a little muscle to get the other side in. You will have to force it a little bit, and we'll do this same for the rear. Make sure...yep, this says rear right on the sticker. So we'll put that end in first. Give a little bend here we'll get in place. You'll notice that the top is a little bit higher than the front one here.Next thing we're gonna do is install our new bow mount brackets in the rear here. So we're gonna come through and unzip the protective fabric over our roll bar here. And that's gonna expose our bow bracket. I'm gonna take our old one off so we can put the new one on. And I have a T30 Torx bit on my impact gun. Now, we don't need to worry about saving the hardware. They provide new hardware with this bracket.All right. Once you've got your old bracket off, you can install your new one. Just keep in mind that they are labeled up and they are labeled left and right. So make sure you're grabbing the correct bracket. This is gonna go on pretty much same way that it went off. Using the provided hardware, we'll get this right back in place. And again, it's a T30 Torx bit. We can go ahead and tighten this up right now. And we can do the same thing on the other side.Next thing we're gonna do is insert our bow into the soft top header panel. Before we do that, we need to remove these two screws on the header panel. Phillips head screwdriver on my drill. We'll remove these two and get our fabric out of the way. You also wanna take a notice that the hook on the bow faces in. So go ahead. Insert this. We'll line up our two screws. You wanna go grab two pan head Phillips head screws that are provided in the hardware pack. And we will get this bow screwed down to our header panel. Wanna do is flip your bow up a little bit, and we need to put two more screws in the backside of this. All right. We can go to the other side and do the same thing. First we'll remove two screws on our fabric. Put them aside. Next, we'll put our bow in place. Again, make sure this hook is facing in. We're gonna slide this in. Get our two holes lined up. Two pan head screws that are included. We got our two bottom screws in place here. Next thing we're gonna do is take our bow assembly and attach it to the bow brackets that we just installed. So, we'll place this up here. And we wanna pull back on the spring-loaded pin here, slide it in place, and it will lock into one of the holes on the bow bracket.Next thing we're gonna do is attach our bow stop to the bow assembly. All we need to do is slide this in place on the bracket. And we're gonna be using two of the coarse thread Phillips head screws that they provide. And we'll go ahead and get this screwed into place. And there's one screw on each side of this bracket. All right. We can do the same thing on the other side now.Next we're gonna take the second half of our bow assembly and we are going to attach it to the first half. So pull back on our spring-loaded clip here. Slide it down. Let it snap into place once it finds the hole, there you go. We come over to this side and do the same thing now. All right. Now once you have these attached, we wanna swing this down. Snap it into our bow stop.Next thing we're gonna do is take our soft top fabric and lay the header up on the top of the windshield channel here. Once we get it up, we're gonna flip the fabric over and let it lay on top of the hood of the Jeep. So once you get the header panel up top, we're gonna take our fabric and fold it over the front of the Jeep. Next thing we need to do on both sides is lay our bow legs into the door channel surrounds here. And you wanna push down on the locking latch here and we'll lock our bow legs right in place. I'm gonna go to the other side and do the same thing.Next thing we're gonna do is make the connection from our bow leg to the rear bow. So we need to slide that end right in. And we're gonna use the provided Torx bolt, then we'll get this guy started in here. And this is a T30 Torx bit. We'll go over, do the same thing on the other side now. Next thing we're gonna do is take the bow assembly number two and drop it in to our header channel here. And what we wanna do is attach this bow to the J-brackets on the inside of our door surrounds right here. So we need to take two nylon washers and put them on the each end of our bow. And we can slide this in. All right. We're gonna do the same thing in the rear now. We got two plastic washers going on our bow. We're gonna use the long M5 bolt and the nyloc nut. I have a eight-millimeter socket and a Phillips head on my drill to tighten these up. And we'll do the same thing on the other side now. We'll start off by putting two plastic washers on each end. Slide this down into its hole and get our M5 bolt through here followed by a nyloc, and we'll tighten this down. Next thing we're gonna do is fold our fabric all the way back. We're gonna connect the end of the fabric to our stay straps here. Once you've got this folded back now, we're gonna go back up front and fold the Sunrider portion open. All right. We can now attach our stay straps to the rear portion of the bow. We're gonna use three pan head screws that are provided. Before I tighten all of them up, I'm gonna get all of them started. Now, from here, we're gonna go back a little bit. And if you find there are two more holes in our stay strap, what we need to do here is screw these in to the other portion of our bow. All right. We're gonna do the same thing on the other side of the Jeep now.Next thing we're gonna do is take our cable pocket and slide our cable through here. We're gonna leave this out of the way for now. Once we have that through, we can attach our spring to the bottom hole. Now, once we have that attached, we can go ahead and crimp it so we don't lose it and it doesn't fall out of where it's supposed to be. All right. We'll do the same thing on the other side. Now we're gonna bolt the cover on that we slid in place beforehand. Grab the M4 screws, they're very small, with a nyloc nut. Gonna do the same thing on the other side.Next thing we're gonna do is take the fabric here. Wrap it around the back of the last bow and we're gonna screw it right to the bow. We're gonna be using the pan head screws that are provided. And we can go right down the line. Screw all these in. Now, I'm gonna keep these somewhat loose until I get all of them started and then I'll go back through and tight them all down. All right. Once you've got them all started, you can go back through and tighten them all down now. We're gonna take our tailgate bar mount. We're gonna start on the back here and roll it forward until it snaps into place. And we'll do the same thing on the other side.We're now ready to install our quarter windows. We're gonna take the top edge of our quarter window and slide it in the bottom edge of the top fabric. Once we have that in place, we want to start to secure the door channel. Next we wanna take our pin and put it into the rubber grommet here of the top of the bow assembly. So basically just gonna fold this over. And now we can get our Velcro attached down here. And we'll get the bottom edge of our window secured into the channel on the Jeep.Once you have the quarter window attached to the bottom channel here, what you wanna do is take the strap that has the button on it and snap it to the back side of the tailgate catch. We are now ready to slide our rear window into place. It's gonna be the same as the quarter windows. And we need to slide this channel all the way through. All right. With the top in place, now we need to snap the sides into place here. Gonna fold this top edge back down now.All right. So one of our last steps here. We're gonna slide our tailgate support bar into the rear window channel. There is this round lip here that slides into the backside of our tailgate bar. So we just go down. Work our way down. All right. Now, once you've got your panel in place here, you wanna take this edge, fold it right on under here. That's gonna hold it in place, same over here. And we can close our tailgate now. All right. The last and final step of our install here is to latch your header panel down. That's gonna wrap up our review and install. Be sure to check out this top and more at extremeterrain.com.