Front Mount Trailer Hitch Receiver Skid Shield - 2" Hitch

Video Transcript for Draw-Tite Front Mount Trailer Hitch Receiver Skid Shield Review

Hi there hard workers and off-roaders. Today we're going to be taking a look at Draw-Tite's skid shield for front mounted hitches. Now when you look at this, you might be wondering, well, what is it for I was wondering the same thing. When I hear skid plate, I was thinking something much larger, but this is really designed to protect your front mounted hitch and the area around the front of that hitch there on your vehicle. It's not necessarily designed as a complete brush guard, but it's for the receiver itself because if you don't have anything in your receiver, a lot of dirt and debris are eventually going to work their way in there. It also protects your receiver from low-lying objects that are on the road.

If the skid plate wasn't in place, it could bend or damage the metal and potentially cause it to bend or damage it in a way where you could no longer put things in the receiver without having to grind that out.If you we're to grind it out, you could also potentially lower the structural integrity of your hitch. So it's best just to protect it in the first place and prevent it from receiving any damage. So you can think of this as like a hitch cover for the front of your vehicle, but one that is significantly more robust. It's able to do that thanks to it's all steel construction, giving you a solid point of contact for whatever may hit it. To protect the skid plate, it has a black powder coat finish on it to prevent any rust and corrosion.

I also like the design of it. We've got a small flat area here in the front, which if we had any walls or surfaces there, this would contact first and it would give us that information. Once we would get that impact, it wouldn't hit our truck, but it would hit our skid plate here and on the inside we'd be able to react at that time.I also like that it has the 45 here, so on low lying objects if you hit it, especially if you're at any higher speed, the 45 degree angle would cause it to lift up a little bit on your truck and minimize the impact. When you have a straight impact it's going to be more force exerting at one time and this is going to allow the force to bounce off of each other, minimizing how much is going to bend or damage on the truck, if any at all since it's going to divert that force away. You can also use this to protect any front mounted accessories that you may have with the large opening we have here on this vehicle, a custom mounted bracket and winch could easily be installed right here and we don't want anything to come in contact with our winch, we would want to divert any force away from that.

This skid plate could protect those front mounted accessories.On some of your front mounted hitches, the hitch receiver is fairly well hidden and could potentially be in a location where we might have some contact when trying to put this in. I've got some measurements for you. You can see how close we are here on ours and one of the most important ones is from the center of our hitch pin hole to the furthest point which is going to measure about five and three quarter inches, this gives you an idea of the depth. From the center of the hitch pin hole to the closest point, it's going to be three and a quarter inches. The plate at the front is going to measure five inches wide by four and a quarter inch in height.When comparing the Draw-Tite to the Curt, they're going to have similar shape, size, and finishes.

So the only real difference is the Curt here does have an extra tie down point at the front, which I like to have if you've got that option. It's really not that useful unless you do have that over the cab ladder rack, but you just never know. It's secured to our receiver using a five eighths hitch pin and clip. One doesn't come included, but we have plenty available here at etrailer.com and that completes our look at Draw-Tite skid shield for front mounted hitches.