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

Video Transcript for Stealth Hitches Hidden Rack Receiver Towing Kit Installation - 2015 Mercedes-Benz GLK-Class

Hey guys, this is Jake here at etrailer. Today, we have a 2015 Mercedes-Benz GLK. And we're gonna be taking a look at, and I'm gonna show you how to install the Stealth Hitches towing kit. So our vehicle here is already equipped with the Stealth Hitch. We had actually installed it about a month ago here at etrailer and the owners of the vehicle decided they wanted to start towing trailers with it. Well, with the original kit, it is just the receiver tube kit, so you can't tow trailers with it.

So they want to add this on so they can tow those trailers. This kit is going to include seven pole wiring, your safety chain loops, the bracket tree you need to mount the wiring, and the shank for your ball. You have to tow the trailer with this shank. You cannot put a ball mount in their original, in their bike rack mount. There's a warning label all over it that says, "Do not put a ball mount inside that, and do not tow with it." Because it's too much vibration inside of the original shank for them to like you to use it with that.

So you have to tow a trailer with this specific kit. The kit overall is pretty, pretty comprehensive. It's not hard to install, especially with the instructions that they include with the installation. Now, in the nature of Stealth Hitches, the whole point of it is for the kit to be hidden. So our seven pole is hidden and you can get to it by reaching up underneath our bumper.

The safety chain loops I will say are kind of small. They work pretty good for S hook style safety chains. The clevis style might be a little bit more difficult to get back here. You can see here they're just kinda, they're very small safety chain openings. So if you've got a trailer, I'd look into maybe changing out your clevis style to a larger S hook style, like these.

As we mentioned earlier, with your kit, you're also gonna get this ball mount. It will not come with the ball preassembled on it, so you will have to have a pretty big torque wrench to be able to torque this nut down on the bottom. But we're gonna give you some measurements so that you know how well it's gonna work with your trailer. So from the ground as our vehicle's sitting now to the top of the ball is about 17 1/4, and then from the ground to the top of this base here, it's gonna be about 14 1/4. So use that as you will to be able to determine whether or not this is gonna be a good fit for your trailer. Now lastly, the ball that is included is going to be a two-inch ball. So if you decide that you want a different ball, we've got plenty of them on our website that you can swap this one out for to be able to get the correct size to tow your trailer. As far as the installation goes, for this particular install, we had to remove everything again, we brought the car back in about a month after we did the first install. The biggest thing with this kit is that you have to take the whole car apart anyway to get it installed. So I highly recommend if you think you might be towing at all, go ahead and install this kit. When you install your Stealth Hitch in the first place. I'd say that you can do it if you're really careful without removing the fascia, again. The biggest issue is that putting the bolts in and putting that block back up into place underneath and behind that fascia is gonna be very difficult. It has a very high torque rating for those bolts. So fitting a torque wrench up there is gonna be near impossible, even if you have a lift. We had ours about six feet in the air, and we still couldn't fit a torque wrench under there. So in order to install it, the best way we found is just install it like you're installing the hitch. So that's why I recommend doing it at the same time of the hitch. But if you bought the vehicle, and already had one on there, and it didn't have the tow package on it, that's what we're here to show you today. To begin our installation, we're going to be removing this panel in the rear hatch of our vehicle. You wanna set it up and outta your way. I just toss it up into the back seat, and then we'll have a side panel on either side. You'll take the this little knob, twist it to the side, we'll set those up there too, just get 'em out of our way. And then we're gonna have a T30 torque bit screw right here on the back side. (drill buzzing) Then we're going to pull up on this trim panel piece here. What you wanna do is just pull straight up. If you need to use a trim panel tool, you can, but I found that if you just get a good grip on 'em, you can pop those fasteners loose. We're gonna set that up in our back seat. Now, we're going to take out the driver's side panel. Got that here. Then, we'll have a T40 torque bit down here in the bottom that we'll have to remove. (drill buzzing) So we'll take that out And then I'll have to look for another one. There it is down in here. (drill buzzing) Now that that's loose, throw my other screw in with that one and take this out. Then, we'll come over to our passenger side, and we'll take this little cover out here and expose two more T40 screws. (drill buzzing) Looks like we've got a couple of nuts down here still holding this panel in. These are gonna require a 10 millimeter. (drill buzzing) Here we go. Pop this panel out and we'll set all that to the side. Now, back along this rear bumper support, we're gonna have four holes that look like this, and we're gonna have a 10 millimeter nut on the inside of each one of 'em. We need to take all four of those out. (drill buzzing) Now, what might be helpful to you to get those, the nuts off of the studs is to use a magnet to stick back in that hole and to pull off the nut. The studs are really long, but the threads are only at like the last quarter inch, so it helps to hold the nut in place. But if you slide a magnet in there, you can go in there and grab it. Now, we're gonna take an eight millimeter socket and remove the three nuts that are holding our taillights in place. We'll have one here and then two on the other side. (drill buzzing) Now, we need to slide our taillights out. If you've not taken 'em off before, that might be a little bit more difficult to slide 'em out because this seal can bind up a little bit And we will push on this little tab, and pry our wiring out. There's one on each side. Now, the next step in our process, if you have the mud flaps, you're gonna have a few more steps, but you can follow along with us. If you don't have mud flaps, you're just gonna have two push pin fasteners that you'll need to remove and then pull the wheel wall liner back and get the 10-millimeter head bolt out. But if you have these, we're gonna have a couple more screws, as well to take out too. Now, right here we have a push pin fastener that's actually missing. You'll want to take this one out, and then there's gonna be one a little bit further down. You wanna use something small like a pick or a small screwdriver. You wanna pry the center out. Here we go. Enough to where we can get a flathead screwdriver on it, and I like to pop those out all the way. There we go. We've got the center out. Now, we need to get the base out. Now, we have one Phillips head screw in here that's holding our mud flap on. Then, we'll have this clip that's holding our mud flap on. Take that off, and then underneath on the inside we're gonna have two more Phillips head screws. (drill buzzing) And we can pull our mud flap off. Now, we're gonna take our 10 millimeter socket and get this bolt removed. (drill buzzing) Now, all along the bottom we're gonna have a couple of different fasteners we have to remove. We'll have some T25 torque bits and then also two 10-millimeter head bolts. We'll just get those removed. The best way to find that you have removed them all is the fascia will be loose. If you can't find every one of 'em, that's okay. Just pull on the fascia and make sure that you get 'em all removed. (drill buzzing) Now, with an extra set of hands, we're gonna start removing our bumper. We're gonna pull back on this fascia here, and again, if yours has never been removed, it might be a little bit more difficult. Ours has been removed before. To put the hitch on, we'll slide this out. You'll want to have a trim panel tool with you when you're doing this, and then we'll push down on these white tabs one at a time, and then it'll pop off. Looks like we've got one wiring harness right here in the middle that we have to disconnect. Push that little tab, pull backwards. Now, we'll set our fascia in a safe place. Now, with our fascia removed, we can see our Stealth Hitch. You can see that it does not have the tow package on it. They we inchesre just originally using it for a bike rack, so we'll need to add the tow loop to it. We'll need to take these two bolts out. Use a 15/16 wrench, and socket in order to do this. And then we'll take our safety chain loops, slide those over. You wanna make sure that the safety chain loop itself is facing back towards the vehicle, not towards the outside. We'll take our other one, do the same thing, kind of get our pieces stacked up here, and then you'll want to slide it back up into place and slide our bolts back in. (metal clanking) Next, we'll take our wiring bracket, slide it over the ends of our bolts, and we'll take the new nuts that come in our kit and thread those on. (drill buzzing) (drill buzzing) Now, if you don't have a torque wrench, typically you can go to your local auto parts store to be able to rent one to tighten these down. If not, we've got 'em on our website that you can definitely purchase. Now, to begin on our wiring, we're gonna have two grommet here. One has a wire running through it already, the other one is blank. We're gonna take a trim panel tool or a screwdriver, pop that grommet out of there, and then we need to drill a 3/8 in hole in there for the wire to pass through. Now, we can take the end of our wire that has our seven wires on it. We'll slide it over our grommet so that the grommet can be properly placed back into the hole. We're gonna pull this grommet or the wiring outside, put that grommet back in place. And then on the outside you just wanna make sure you've got enough to be able to reach where a seven pole's gonna go. We can actually probably pull a little bit back, Let you get that. Wanna make sure you got your grommet in place that it doesn't pop out. Whenever we're all said and done, we've got all our connections made. We will fill in around that grommet with a little bit of RTV black silicone, but you want to take your control box now, which is at the other end of the wire, and we're gonna begin making connections into our factory wiring. Now this portion of the install can be kind of confusing, so I'm gonna use the provided chart from Stealth Hitches. I'm gonna go ahead and get these connected up to the right wires that they're supposed to be connected to, and then we'll come back and show you those connections. From our harness on the one side, we're gonna have a green, red, yellow, and brown wire. We're gonna connect the green and brown on our passenger side. The yellow, you'll wanna run over to your driver's side, and the red on this particular vehicle, we're not using it because the vehicle itself is gonna use the green and yellow as the stop signal so you don't have to use the red as a separate stop signal. Now additionally, on the other harness you'll have a purple wire and a blue wire. The purple wire is going to be your reverse light wire. The blue wire is going to be your brake signal. Now, like I said, we're not gonna be using the red wire, and we're also not going to be connecting up the blue wire. The blue wire is going to be connected up to your brake controller. We don't have a brake controller, and they're not planning on buying one right now, so we'll just leave that blue wire bundled up in the back of the car, so that it's ready for them. It's right there whenever they need to run it to the front and connect it to that. The reverse light wire though, we will connect in case their trailer has any features, like if they have a small boat trailer or something like that. That doesn't require a brake controller a lot of the times, but it will require the reverse lockout to be opened up so that the they can back up with the trailer. Now, to make all of our connections, we're going to use the quick connects that come with our kit. You just simply slide your two wires in and then crimp down the connector, and then it will splice into the wire, and we don't have to cut any of our factory wires. The brown wire is gonna get attached to the gray and blue. You can see there we have a little bit of fading on our wiring, so it's kind of hard to see the true color, but you can see the gray with a blue stripe. The green wire from our kit is gonna get attached to the blue wire, and then the purple wire will get attached to the gray wire with a yellow stripe. This is all on our passenger side. Now, we'll go over to the driver's side and show you the yellow wire. So on the driver's side, our yellow wire is going to get connected to the orange wire. Then, you're gonna have a black and white wire. That's gonna be your power and ground. The white wire is gonna be your ground. Use the ring terminal that's included in your kit and tie that to the ground that is right here on the stud. Now, to wire up our seven pole, even though we're not connecting up the blue to the vehicle, we're gonna go ahead and connect it up to our seven pole, so that way it's done, and they don't have to get back into it. But where we're going to attach our wires is starting from our key slot down here at the bottom, we're gonna have our white wire, then our yellow wire and our brown wire. The purple is gonna go in the center. Then you'll have your black, then green, then your blue. So we're gonna go ahead and get those all connected. I'll show you the first one. We're gonna take a screwdriver and open this up. And you'll see that little set of jaws open. We're gonna take our white wire, slide it in. Slide it in. If you bend it over, it'll help hold it for you. Then, we'll tighten that screw down. Give it a tug to make sure it's holding on there. Now, we'll go ahead and repeat that same process for the remaining colors. Now, once you get your seven pole all mounted up, with all your wires in there, you want to mount it to the bracket. This is how you want the bracket to be sitting on the side bracket. You'll use the included screws and bolts to be able to attach it here. You want to mount it so that it opens towards where the trunk area is, so it's easier to connect to. Now, we'll want to take our black wire, which is gonna be our power wire. I just ran it down through the same route that our main harnesses coming down through, that same grommet. Just run it out there, and then use the included heat shrink butt connector, connect it off to your big extended black wire. We're gonna take this up to the vehicle's battery and get the power connected. Now, the way we ran our power wire is we went down underneath the vehicle. It went through in behind this heat shield. It came out right above here. You wanna stay away from anything hot or moving. So we just went over top of our frame struts, went over here, and then on the other side of this frame piece, we came down and then we basically followed this belly pan. We just, you loosen up some of these plastic screws or bolts up with a 10 millimeter. If you gotta take any of the metal ones down, it's gonna be an eight millimeter. We just ran it all the way through this track. So we got up here, we ran it outside, and then we came back in, ran it up through here and up into our engine bay. Now, we've got our wire up in our engine bay. We connected it to our fuse holder that comes in our kit. You wanna pull that fuse out before we connect it up to our positive connection. We just tested all three of these with the vehicle off, and they all are working. We removed this center one and Mercedes has these funky looking battery terminals. They have the nut kind of trapped onto the the terminal itself. So we're just gonna take that and put it back on to the stud, and then tighten that nut down. (drill buzzing) Now, we can take our fuse and put it in our fuse holder. Now, we'll go through our basic functions and make sure our wiring's working properly. Start with our left turn, our right turn, our running lights, and our brake lights. Now that we know our wiring's working properly, we're gonna put our fascia back onto our vehicle and get everything back in working order. Now when we've installed our hitch, the bumper fascia only needed to be trimmed out so much, but now that we have our bracket for our wiring over here, we're gonna have to trim out a little bit more. So we can feel up where our seven pole is, and I'm gonna start by cutting straight here and then straight over to this point that we had it earlier. (saw buzzing) Well guys, once we know everything's working properly, we've got our vehicle back together the way that we found it. That's gonna do it for a look at, and installation of, the Stealth Hitches towing kit on our 2015 Mercedes-Benz GLK.