Towing Kit w/ Ball Mount and Trailer Wiring for Stealth Hitches Hidden Rack Receiver - 2" Ball

Video Transcript for Stealth Hitches Towing Kit with Ball Mount and Trailer Wiring Installation - 2018 Lexus RX 350

Hi there, Lexus owners. Today on your 2018 RX 350, we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install the full tow package conversion kit for your Stealth Hitch rack receiver. This full tow package kit will fully unlock your Lexus RX regular Stealth Hitch rack receiver to all the capabilities that you would want out of a hitch. Instead of just being able to use your receiver here for accessories, you'll be able to remove that receiver and install a drawbar here. so you can hook up a trailer to it. You get a two inch ball with it.

And included in this kit as well, you'll get safety cable attachment that you can add to your hitch here as well. So that way you'll be fully legal for towing. And you'll also gonna get a 4-pole flat trailer connector for those lighting signals on your trailer as well. Both the rack receiver and the drawbar had a 350 pound tongue weight, which again is gonna be enough for those cargo carriers and bike racks. You can have a four-bike rack fully loaded up with that.

The cargo carrier, you will be able to get a lot of gear out of your vehicle. But the largest ones here at etrailer are gonna have a higher rating than that. So you won't be able to load them up all the way to the max, but you should definitely be able to get some more room for passengers and more gear inside the vehicle. The rack receiver here is not rated for towing. This is only for accessories.

So it only has a 350 pound tongue weight rating. Our drawbar though is rated for towing and has a 3,500 pound gross towing capacity and that's how much they can pull behind it. And with that, that's gonna be good for like we discussed, those a pop-up campers and jet-skis, maybe a small boat. All those things are gonna work out really well. As long as you got a two inch coupler to hook onto the ball here.

Now there are other balls available here at etrailer, so if you needed to swap this out for a different size, you could do so. You do just wanna keep in mind that the 3,500 pound towing capacity is gonna stay the same when you go to put a different ball in here. The only time that it's gonna change is if you put a ball in that has a lower weight rating than what this is here. So let's say you put in a ball that only has a 2000 pound capacity, that's gonna make sure that, that's gonna mean that you only have a maximum of 2000 pounds gross towing capacity. Now I've got some measurements for you. Our drawbar here from the ground to the top of the ball is about 18 inches. And the center of the ball to the edge of our bumper here is about four inches. And the furthest point on our drawbar is here at right at about 5-3/4 of an inch. When towing, you also need to hook up your safety chains and in our full tow package kit here, you will get safety chain loops on your hitch as well. They are gonna be located pretty far underneath. It may have a kind of a small opening. So here's our smaller chains and we can see that that hooks in there with no problem. Our larger chain here, when we go to use it, it does not look like it's gonna work out. So, it looks like it will actually fit. You got to have it at a very specific angle, but it looks like some of those larger chains are gonna be compatible as well. Additionally, you may have saw me remove the wiring. The dust boot works out great to attach it to one of those safety chain loops when you're not using it. But when you are using it, this hitch also comes with a 4-pole flat trailer connector and it's custom fit for your vehicle. So it's a simple plug and play option. So it's really easy to get a full tow package set up on your Lexus RX here with this Stealth Hitch full towing package. Your wiring's gonna give you all your necessary lighting signals, which includes your left turn signal, right turn signal, tail lamps, and brake lamps, keeping you DOT compliant in all states. We're now gonna hit underneath here so we can show you how the mechanism works under here. Here, you can see this is the dust boot for the lock mechanism. So we're gonna go ahead and pull that off of there, and there's our lock. You'll receive two locks with your kit. You'll receive two keys with your kit to unlock it. So we're simply just gonna take one of those there and unlock it. Once we have it unlocked, there is a twist handle on the opposite side. We're just gonna give that a twist here and you can see as we twisted it, it just drops out of there. It also locks itself in that real beast position. And that's great because now that we've got this removed, installing something is as easy as just pushing it straight up and then it clicks itself right back into that position that holds it into place. We always wanna make sure we push our lock tab back in, before we go to use this into service. We're gonna go ahead and swap this out for our rack receiver so you can see that one as well. So we're just gonna twist this again, until that drops out of there. We'll grab the rack receiver that slides up into place, and then we'll lock it in before we go to attach any accessories to that. With our rack receiver, this is only for accessories. You'll secure your accessories using a 5/8 inch hitch pin and clip. One doesn't come included with the hitch, but we've got a lot available here at etrailer. And I would recommend getting a locking one. So that way, nothing's gonna walk away from your hitch while it's on here. Since the rack receivers here locked, is lock on completely to your vehicle, you should lock on your accessories as well to keep yourself safe. It is a 2-inch by 2-inch receiver. We talked about how great that's gonna be for all your accessories, but we're gonna give you some additional measurements here so you can see how those accessories are gonna work in this hitch and your vehicle here. From the center of the hitch pin hole to the edge of the rear bumper, it's right at about two inches. That's important when determining if your accessories can be placed inside the receiver without contacting the bumper, and if they can be placed in the upright storage position without contacting the bumper. And from the ground to the top inside of the receiver tube, it's right at about 15-1/2 inches. And this is important when determining if you need a drop or rise or a raised shank on your accessories. Now that we've gone over some of the features, why don't you follow along with us and we'll show you how to get it installed. We're gonna first need to remove the bolts that hold our center piece in place. So we can go ahead and get this piece out of the way as well if you've got this in here. Just grab your keys and let's get this out of here. So we're simply just gonna unlock it, twist the mechanism until it drops out of there and get that out of the way. We'll then grab our 15/16 socket and wrench so we can get the nuts off of the hardware that we've got on here. And I do recommend leaving the bolt in there, we are gonna be swapping it out with longer bolts 'cause that's gonna be necessary for our safety chain loops. But if we leave the bolt in there, that'll hold the center mechanism in place for us. So now we've got both of those loose and it's just kinda hanging up in there. We can now go ahead and take these bolts out. I'm gonna take them both out. So you do need to get the entire assembly pulled down out of there 'cause it's very difficult to get the safety chain loops on there with it up in here like this. So I'm just gonna get both of those out of there. And then we'll just wiggle our receiver down out of there, the little mechanism here. And now that we've got that down, we can take our safety chain loops. We want to make sure that the attachment for the safety chain loops is gonna be towards the front of the vehicle. So it'll just gonna slide on like this and we can then slide this back up into position now. And it is pretty tight. It's pretty normal for it to be tight. There we go. We'll then twist our safety chain loop around and then we're gonna insert the longer bolts that come in our kit. And these are the longer bolts. They're only about a quarter inch longer, maybe a half inch. They're not very much longer than the one that we just took out, but what we need that extra length. So we're gonna go through our safety chain loop and then get it through our mechanism here. There we go. We'll then take the other bolt and we're gonna do the same thing in the other hole here, get this lined up. And on the other, it's much easier to get your safety chain attachment hooked on. And you'll also notice the bolts that we're using are the same diameter as the ones we took out 'cause in your conversion kit, you're gonna get two different safety chain loops and bolt size. And you're also gonna get half inch ones. Those are the half inches for the one, the holes that they match up with. So as far, we're using the beefier looking ones here with the bigger bolts. We'll just slide that one on there then. And then we're gonna use the new nylon locking nuts that come in our kit to secure it on the other side. Now we've got those on there and we can torque them down. I just wanna show you, these are the old bolts. This is the ones that come in the rack receiver box and the longer ones are the ones that come in the other box. You are gonna have some extra hardware and you can just toss that to the side. We'll then use a 15/16 socket and wrench to tighten these down. We'll then torque our hardware to the specifications outlined in our instructions. So now that we've got our hitch fully installed, what is left now is to prepare our drawbar, the ball we'll have to install onto the bar and we'll get our wiring installed. We'll go ahead and get the drawbar prepared real quick. So we can get that clicked into there and show you what that's gonna look like. To prepare our drawbar, we're gonna take the mechanism here where it clicks in. That's our drawbar. We're gonna take the ball that comes in our kit. That's gonna slide down right into there, like that. We'll then follow that up with a lock washer and the nut on bottom and you can go and get those tightened down. And then we're over here at our vice because we're gonna need to hold this all together, hold our ball on everything while we go to tighten this down. And it's a pretty high torque spec. I also like to take the ball and it's not necessary, but I like to line up the horizontal flat spots here with the drawbar. I think it just looks nicer that way. We'll then open up our vice, we're going to clamp the ball inside of it. And then we're going to use a 1-1/2 inch socket to torque our ball to the specifications outlined in our instructions. I'm doing it like this so I can keep pressure on this to keep it, so that way that ball's always in line. Now that we've got it torqued down, you can just slide that out of there and it's nice and straight and this is now ready to insert into our rack whenever we're ready. So we're just gonna go ahead and get that inserted so we can see what it looks like, and that just clicks into place there. And of course, we always wanna make sure we press that lock mechanism in to make sure that that's not gonna come out of there. So we've got the hitch fully prepared now for towing. Next, we'll need to get our wiring setup. So that way, when we are pulling a trailer, we've got all those necessary lighting signals. Our vehicle here has a factory tow package and the wiring that comes with it plugs directly in. So it's an extremely easy Stealth Hitch to install to get your whole Lexus ready for towing, for just about anything you wanna put it through. And the wiring super easy because there's our connector right there. We're on the driver's side at the very back corner, just above our exhaust pipe, you can see the white cap right there. We're gonna press in on the release tab and then remove the cap. And here's the release tab there that I was pressing on. We can just set that aside. We won't need it. And then we'll grab the wire harness that comes with our kit. This is gonna have a custom fit connector. That's gonna plug directly in to that factory connector there. So we'll just simply give it a click. That's gonna put it into place and then we can take our wiring here and we can bring it over to the center of our hitch, where we can secure it with the included zip ties. We can now install the dust cap. The exposed pin there is gonna be on the same side as the little hoop there. So we're just gonna slide the hoop over the end. And this will just go over to protect it from corrosion. You will get some dielectric grease included with it. We're not gonna be putting it on here today. For demonstration purposes, which you'll wanna squirt that up inside of here to help protect it against rust and corrosion. And then when you're not using your wiring, you can simply wrap it around here and we can secure it to the safety chain loop on our hitch. At that point, it's just cleaning up any of our wiring. You can use some more of the zip ties included with the kit if you wanted to further secure the wiring and snip off any excesses that you have there. We've now gone ahead and plugged in a tester because really, at this point, our installation's complete, but we wanna make sure everything's working properly. You could plug into your trailer. However, I highly recommend getting a tester like you see here. You can get this here at etrailer and this way you can ensure your vehicle's working properly 'cause if you have any faults on your trailer, it could give you a false reading whether or not your vehicle's working properly. So now we've got it plugged in, we wanna make sure that we've got our left turn signal, right turn signal, tail lamps, and brake lamps. And we can see all of our signals are working properly back there. So at this point, we're ready to load up our favorite accessories, hook up to our trailer, whatever we wanna do, and hit the road. And that completes our installation of the Stealth Hitches full tow package kit for the upgrade of your rack receiver on your 2018 Lexus RX 350..