Mount-n-Lock Heavy-Haul'r Replacement RV Bumper - 4.0" Wide - 500 lbs - Mill Finish

Video Transcript for Mount-n-Lock Heavy-Haulr Replacement RV Bumper Installation - 2020 Dutchmen Coleman Lantern Travel T

Hey guys, it's Jake here with etrailer. Today, we're taking a look at and we're gonna show you how to install the Mount-n-Lock HEAVY-HAUL'R Four-Inch RV Bumper on our 2020 Dutchmen Coleman travel trailer. Upgrading your RV's bumper to this bumper is gonna allow you to safely haul accessories on the back of your RV. This bumper actually is gonna have a weight capacity of 500 pounds. Standard RV bumpers, most of them don't even have a weight capacity because they're not tested to have accessories mounted to them. You may not have seen it, but we've seen it many a times, an accessory like a hitch like we have here or a bike rack or something is inserted in a hitch, and the bumper has either ripped off or twisted because the wall of the bumper, so the thickness of the tube itself, is too thin and it's not rated to tow.

And people use it like that. Because they make accessories for it, they think it's okay. And most of them are not. If you do not have an extra support behind your standard RV bumper, the one that comes with your factory, then your bumper is not designed to use for towing. Some of them will have a cross beam.

I know on my fifth wheel, I have a cross beam that's welded to an I-beam that is welded underneath my RV bumper, and I have a hitch on mine and I can tow with it. This bumper is gonna be rated for 500 pounds and it's designed to replace that factory bumper that you otherwise shouldn't be doing much with. Now, if you're not looking to upgrade your entire RV bumper because it is quite an extensive installation, we do have brackets that are designed to mount underneath also made by Mount-n-Lock. They mount underneath and then they bolt to either side of your frame rail. And that's the whole point is that we want to get this secured to the frame rail, rather than having a small bead weld of the frame just welded to the backside of our bumper.

Those welds pull off all the time because they're welded really quick just essentially to get the bumper to hold on and for you to slide one of your sewer hoses in the end of it. If you want to be able to get a higher capacity out of it, I would definitely recommend upgrading the entire bumper assembly. Now, you might be thinking, and it's the same as me, you don't like the look of a natural aluminum-colored bumper on the back of your RV that has no other brush aluminum accessories on it. We do have some black powder-coated bumpers from Mount-n-Lock on our website if you want it to match your old one and other accessories on your RV. Well, another thing I really like about this kit is that I see on forums all the time and on different social media sites that somebody saw another sewer hose laying on the side of the road.

The RV, this RV, when it came in, was missing the end caps to its rear bumper. Whether they we're there or not, we don't know. But there's a lot of people that what happens is you have a sewer hose stored in there, which is perfectly fine. That's what it's intended for. And the sewer hose will slide from side to side when you're traveling down the road because it fits loosely inside that bumper. What'll happen is you go make a turn, your tail swing gets a little fast, and then that hose will slide, pop that cap out, and then there goes your sewer hose. What Mount-n-Lock did is they made it so that it's kinda like a trap-door design. You'll have a little bolt here that keeps this from coming out. And then when this is down, you don't ever have to worry about your sewer hose sliding out. It also will have some vent holes, so that your sewer hose can naturally dry. Now, as far as the installation goes on this bumper it will come with all of the hardware included to get it installed, but it will require quite a bit of work to get the old bumper off. If you are fortunate enough to where your bumper is bolted on, that's great. Hopefully, you can reuse some of the holes drilled in the frame, but you will have to drill four holes on each side of the frame rail, and you'll have to cut off the old bumper. But other than that, I would just say definitely have patience when installing this kit because what'll happen is you might get some of your brackets installed and they do not like to move, which is really nice because they'll bite into the top of the bumper, but you cannot adjust it once you get it installed. What had kind of fooled us a little bit, and we just had assumed, but I recommend to not assume, that the frame was square with the bumper itself. So you can see here, there's a little bit of space between the edge of our bumper and the side of our RV, but on that side there's little to no space. You want to be sure that this bumper is square with the frame rails and not square with the actual box sitting on top of it. Our RV has actually shifted a whole inch this way. That's why we have that extra space. So just make all your measurements based off of your frame rails and don't pay any attention to the actual box itself. But with that being said, let's go ahead and pull it in the shop and show you how we did it. Now, from the factory, these bumpers are not load-bearing bumpers. You can get brackets from Mount-n-Lock that mount on either side of the bumper, but even so, with those, they're not gonna add any additional support to the center of our rear bumper. So if you plan on towing a trailer behind your travel trailer, then what you'll need to do is you'll need to get a full replacement like we're doing today. There's a couple different issues with this factory bumper. The tubing is too thin to be able to be weight bearing, and you may see going down the road the actual tube itself will twist. Ours has started to twist a little bit and it looks like there used to be a hitch receiver on here or at least a spare tire mounted down towards the end there. Just that spare tire bouncing on the back or a generator carrier, what have you. They obviously had something here, and it added a twisting action to the top of this bumper. In addition, this bumper doesn't have the end caps anymore, so the owner of this motor home just wanted to. or RV wanted to just replace the whole thing, so that he knows if he wants to tow a trailer, he can do that, as long as you're in within legal limits of towing a trailer behind your RV. To begin our installation, we need to remove our bumper, but it might be different on different models of campers or even from camper to camper. I've seen that. What we need to do on our specific camper, we have two plates that are welded to the backside of our bumper, and we don't have much of our frame rail to sacrifice here, so we're gonna have to keep as much as it as we can. So we're gonna cut through the bumper through those brackets, then take the bumper off, take the brackets off, and the frame rail will stay the same length. Some bumpers are bolted on, which are really nice 'cause you just take it off, and then bolt the new one on. But yeah, you can see here a little bit better angle. These are the brackets. This bracket is essentially what we need to take off. So we'll cut straight through this one, and the one on the other side of the frame rail, and then take the bumper off, and then take this bracket off. We're just using a hacksaw here to be able to do this. We just wanna be careful when doing this. (hacksaw whirring) (hacksaw whirring continues) (bumper clanging) (hacksaw whirring) (bumper clanging) (hacksaw whirring) (bumper clanging) Now, what we need to do is we need to try to pry this last section of bumper off, and then we'll slide a flathead screwdriver or something back here and try to pry these tabs back and forth to get the end of the frame rail cleaned up. (hacksaw whirring) (bumper clanging) And we're just taking a pry bar and hammering behind this bracket. (bracket clanging) We're gonna pry it out, try to bend it back and forth, and break it off. (bracket thudding) Now, if you have any weld left on the inside, you wanna grind that off. (welding tool whirring) Now, with us having all this exposed metal, we're just gonna take some black spray paint and give it a nice even coating (spray paint hissing) to prevent any rust in the future from flooring. (spray paint hissing) Now, with our paint all dried up, we'll take one of our brackets, hold it up, we'll make sure the end of it here is level. I'm gonna be lining it up. We do have a bolt that sticks out on the other side. It was on this side but I moved it to the other side. You just wanna make sure you're not going to be hitting that when you put your bracket on. Line this up. We're gonna take a punch and punch out the center of each of these holes. Now, we're gonna take a pilot drill bit and drill out our four holes. (drill whirring) We're gonna eventually want to step this up to a 25/64 drill bit. (drill whirring) Now, we'll take five of the brackets that come in our kit. We're gonna take the second one from the top, flip it over, and the fourth one from the top, flip it over, (brackets clattering) and then essentially we're going to have. That's the easiest way to get them like this. You'll have three on the bottom and two on the top. And this is what's going to hold our bumper. And the reason why you wanted the two on the top and three on the bottom is that they're staggered, so that you have one flat pack, but they're gonna be staggered for when you put this ending bracket on. They'll line up perfectly with the slots in this bracket. We're gonna start with this pack. Take a bolt. You'll have a couple of different packs of hardware in your kit. This pack of hardware is just gonna have two bolts and two nuts in it, and this is what it's for. And then, when you can open it up like this to slide your your beam in, but we'll hold it up to our circles, make sure they're all lining up, which it looks like they're all lining up pretty good. Now, what we did here, to get our brackets in place, we marked out where the innermost bracket is going to have to sit on our cross beam. What we did was we measured from the outside to the outside of our frame rails, and we're gonna put this bracket here right on that line or as close to it as we can get because we found out once you get these in place, they're kind of hard to move. (bracket clattering) Just like that. Now, we've marked out our location of our inner bracket. That's gonna go up against our frame rail here. We'll take the outer securing bracket, slide that on, and then we may end up having to take this. (bracket clattering) We're gonna take these, take this nut off, slide it out, lift these two pieces up, slide the end of our bracket on, and slide it back down, making sure our bracket's in the right place. And then, put our nut back in. (bolt clattering) Okay Put our bolt back in and put the nut on that. Now, we'll take a clamp, and this is not absolutely necessary. We just like to keep this patch and a little bit more control, clamp that on. Then, we're going to loosen up this other clamp, and we have to push down on this in order to get all four of our bolt holes to line up again. Essentially, you just wanna try to get one bolt started and that should hold the rest of them in line with one another. Once we've got our bolts pre-threaded through our brackets on our bumper brackets, we threaded them the rest of the way through through the holes that we drilled through our frame rail, and now we're taking our nuts and putting them on the other side and we can tighten them down. (drill whirring) With our bumper installed, before we torque everything down, we'll have to take the little Allen head bolts and the smaller nuts that come in your kit, and we'll insert them in the smaller hole. This is going to help this little door from coming all the way out. So we'll tighten that down, and you can see, it stops the door from coming all the way out. So if you're driving down the road, it's not gonna bounce out of the slot. (bumper clanging) Now, once you have everything tightened and torqued to the specifications in the instructions, that's gonna do it for the installation. One note why we'll make that we discovered when installing this on this camper is that you'll measure your bracket distances from each other based off of the frame rail, and you want your bumper to be square and even on both sides to your frame rail on your RV, not the box. Our box, we discovered, is just about an inch off-square. So we've got 13 inches over here and 14 inches over there. So we do have a little bit extra space from our box hanging over, but it is more important for the structural integrity of this bumper for it to be square with the frame rails than to be square with the box.