Blue Ox Base Plate Kit - Removable Arms

Video Transcript for Blue Ox Base Plate Kit Installation - 2018 Ford Edge BX2657

Hi there, Ford owners. Today, we're going to be taking a look and showing you how to install Blue Ox's baseplate, for your 2018 Ford Edge. There's five main components you'll need when flat towing your vehicle behind your motor home. You'll need your tow bar, which is the connection between your motor home and your vehicle. You'll need your baseplate, which is the connection point that you'll put on the vehicle that your tow bar will attach to. Your safety cables, which is a supplemental connection, in addition to your tow bar.

You'll need your diode wiring, which will take all the lighting signals from your motor home and transfer them to the lights at the back of your vehicles. The people behind you will know your intentions when going down the road. And lastly, your supplemental braking system, which will apply the brakes in your vehicle when you hit the brakes in your motor home to help you come to a safe stop.And additional accessories you might want to consider beyond the five main components, is a charge line kit. That's going to take the alternator, our source of power from our motor home and charge our battery here, on our vehicle. So on those long trips where we haven't started our vehicle in a long time, it's going to ensure that battery stays topped up when we reach our destination.

And this is what our base plate looks like when it's installed. We've got it currently in the mode where you would be driving it around normally, as the arms are removable. We've got the caps that come included with it in the arms, that'll help keep out any dirt, debris and moisture. And you can see that they pass through our fascia. There is some minor trimming that had to be done, but the black color on our base plate blends in very nicely with the front here.

And it really doesn't detract from the looks of the vehicle. It almost to me gives it a more aggressive look, like you're really doing something special with this one here.So we're going to take a look at a couple of closer features on it. So we talked about these just a minute ago, how these are removable, the arms are, and there's a cap for it. When you're ready to flat tow, these arms are going to slide in. Click to lock into place.

You'll have one for the other side. I'm going to get it out of the way, just so we can take a closer look here, at some of the other parts. We'll also have safety chain attachments, just to the inside of our tow bar attachment. And then to the left of that, we have our wiring and our breakaway switch for our electrical. Now the wiring does have a mounting location provided for us on our base plate here.But what I would have liked to have seen would have been a mounting location for the breakaway switch. There wasn't one. We do have no drill short brackets available here at etrailer. We we're able to use that to clamp around our base plate, to provide the same mounting location for it. And we're going to take a closer look at the arms here. This is designed to work with any of Blue Ox's tow bars. Their three point design will have an ear on the outside, on each side, and one in the middle, with a pin that connects it. The pin here is what allows you to remove these arms. You pull it out and that'll let you twist it. And you can see the ends here. This will catch. It slides in one way. And once you turn it, then this end is caught in there. So it can't pull out. Which makes putting them in really easy to simply push it in. So it slides all the way. That'll push the pin for you and then twist it until it snaps in.And while this is designed to work with the three lugs set up here that is on all the Blue Ox tow bars, there are adapters available here at etrailer that will allow you to take Roadmaster tow bars and convert them over. And now when you're all finished up at your campsite and you're ready to leave, you no longer have that big setup of trying to get your car up on your tow dolly or up on a trailer. You can now hook directly up to your motor home. And it's extremely easy. Your tow bar here is going to be on the back of your motor home and stored there most likely the entire time.So when you're ready to hook up, just pull your vehicle up behind it, which you can drive right up behind it and then attach your tow bar to it. The arm's going to extend out, line up with the slots on your tow bar and your base plate. We'll slide our pin all the way through to connect them together. And then you'll have another pin, which comes included with your tow bar. Slide down on the other side and make sure that's locked in. We'll then hook up our safety cables, making sure to cross. So the one on the passenger side of the motor home, I'm stretching over here to the driver's side attachment point on our vehicle, and then vice versa. The driver's side on the motor home is going to attach to the passenger side over here. And that'll give us a cradle here in the center in the event that we did have an unfortunate, catastrophic disconnect. This cradle will provide tension as the cables pulled taut, and keep our components here from digging into the pavement.But other than hooking up your base plate and your cables, the only other component you have is your diode wiring, which is a simple plug connection that goes in and your supplemental braking systems, breakaway switch cable. When you saw it only took just a matter of moments to hook this up, it's much easier than trying to line up a trailer, getting everything cinched down and your vehicle is going to track so much better behind your motor home with a flat tow setup than a trailer ever would. Flat towing your vehicle is a big decision. There's a lot of components that go into it, and you can be confident that if you we're to get this Blue Ox base plate, you would have a strong attachment point here at the front of your vehicle that looks nice.We got a good look at it when we weren't connected. And you can see here where we are connected. It still looks good here at the front of our edge. Nothing really detracts too much. All the connections are nice and tucked in close, and it's going to give us a nice, solid way to bring our vehicle with us when we head to our next destination. And now when it comes to the installation, putting a base plate on a vehicle is no easy feat. You do have to remove the fascia at the front here and quite a few components to get the base plate installed. But when it comes to other vehicles and other base plates, this one is not by far anywhere near the worst. It is going to take you, I would set aside a weekend, to get everything set up and going again, so that way on Monday, you can have your vehicle ready to go. And now that we've covered some of our features, I'm going to go ahead and turn you over to Ryan, who's going to take you step-by-step through the installation. Ryan: To begin our installation, we're going to be working here at the front of her edge, and you want to go ahead and pop the hood. And first thing we need to do is remove this plastic radiator cover here. So it's going to be held in place by 12 push-pin style fasteners, just like this. And the way to get those out, you can take a trim tool or a flat head screwdriver, pry underneath the head of it, and then you can kind of get underneath the base of that fastener as well, and pull it out like that. So I'll just repeat that process to get all of the remaining fasteners removed.Once we have all of them out, we can grab our cover and send it off to the side. With the radiator cover out of the way we can now access six, 10 millimeter bolts, that's holding on the front of our grill. We have one here, here, here. And three more in the same positions on the other side. So grab my pan and get all those removed.Now we can remove our headlights. We're going to have two 10 millimeter bolts on here and one back here. So we'll get those removed. And we can grab our headlight. Start to work it out. Then we need to disconnect the electrical connector, which is this right here. It'll push down on the center of it, and separate the two. So I'll set this light off to the side and repeat the same process to get the other one out as well. Now, what we're able to do with the headlight out of the way, is remove these three bolts, that's connecting the quarter panel to our fascia. So I'll grab an eight millimeter socket and pull all of those out.I'll do this on the other side of our vehicles as well. Now, if you move over here to our front wheel wells, we're going to have a total of six, five and a half millimeter screws that we need to pull out along this edge. It helps to turn your tires in one way or the other. It gives you a little bit more room to work. And with that being said, from this point on, anything we do to one side of our vehicle, we're also going to do on the other side, because it'll be set up the same way. On the underside of our vehicle, along this edge, we're going to have a total 10, five and a half millimeter screws just like this that we need to pull out.Now, we can do, is disconnect our fog light connector. Which is located just underneath where our headlight would have been sitting. And that's the connector right there. The way to get it done is if you push down on the center tab. When you're pushing down on it, you can pull it back and that'll separate it. Just like that. So there's kind of a better view of that tab. You're going to push down and pull out on. Now with an extra set of hands, we can actually remove our fascia. So what you're going to want to do is kind of support it with your body, and right here, we're going to have a tab. You kind of pull up on it to release it. And then you can kind of pull down on the fascia and start to kind of pull it away.Looks like that tab might get hung up on this piece of plastic. So kind of be conscious of that. And before you pull it too far back, you want to make sure that we have everything disconnected, which it looks like over here on the driver's side, we are going to have a few electrical connectors we need to remove. That way we can pull it completely free. So it looks like we're going to need to disconnect the horn, which is right here. These work the same as the other, is this push down on the center tab, freed up, and then we're also going to have this connector right here. You can kind of peel it away from the fascia and make it easier to get to. Disconnect it.We're also going to have two more down here. So again, push down on the center tab, and release. So, once we have everything disconnected, we can set our fascia off to the side, somewhere safe. Now what we can do is disconnect our temperature sensor right here. So you'll push down on the center of the tab and pull it apart. And then what we're going to do is, if you follow this wiring, it's going to run all the way up and along this plastic bumper cover. And we're going to separate that. So you can take a trim tool or a flat head screwdriver, kind of just pry underneath those keepers. So you free up the wiring. It's quite a few of them just along this edge. And once we get all of them undone, we can kind of just push the wiring off to the side and just let it hang out for the time being.At this point, we can actually remove this plastic bumper cover as a whole. And this is just more or less kind of snapped onto our bumper beam. So you can kind of grab it and start to work it away. You may need to kind of pry underneath it a little bit to get it released. Kind of the same deal here at the top. You might need to kind of pry it down. Once we have it off, you can set it off to the side. Now we can do, if we move right here, we have this hood latch sensor we can just connect. Again, just push down on the center, pull it apart. We're going to remove the push-in fasteners that's securing it to our grill guard, which is this large plastic piece. Just kind of set the wiring off to the side there. And we're actually going to have to remove this whole grill guard, this whole plastic shield. So, up top, we're going to have four, 10 millimeter bolts, just like those there.And on each side, we're going to have this one 10 millimeter bolt here we need to pull out. The head of the bolt is on the side right here. Get my socket and get it out. Now on the bottom side here, we're going to have a push-pin style fastener on each corner. So we'll pull that out. And in the middle here, we're going to have two seven millimeter fasteners. If you look right here on each side, we're going to have a large plastic push-pin fastener. Take each one of those out. And once we have them out, we should be able to pull our plastic grill guard away.So kind of just drop it down. Work it off in front of our vehicle and set it to the side. Now, all we need to do is drill a couple access holes. And the first one that we're going to do is located right here on this piece of steel on the face plate here. I'm going to do this one, using a holesaw. That way it'll open it up and we would be able to get our hardware and everything else inside. I'm going to go kind of just in the center there and drill it out.What I went ahead and did, was just use some black paint to kind of paint around the area that we cut open, just to help protect any of that bare metal that was exposed. We're also going to need to create an opening right here on this portion of steel. Now, I found in the past that this section is extremely thick and hardened steel, so it can be very challenging to use a holesaw to create that opening. It can be done. However, it just takes a lot of time. And chances are pretty good, you're going to burn up a bit or two in the process. So, what I found that works a little bit better is simply using a dremel tool, cutoff wheel. So I'm going to use this instead to create this opening here. That way we can get our hardware in.Once we have the big piece cut out, one thing we want to be sure to do is come back and file down any of the rough edges, and round out any of the square corners. Here's how this opening turned out. And once I had rounded off all the edges and kind of filed it down, again put some black paint on there to keep the bare metal protected. And then what we need to do is move to this hole right here. This pre-existing one. Closer to the back of our vehicle. It's a square shape. And what we need to do is take a three inch drill bit, and just ream it out. It's kind of tricky because of the angle, but it can be done.Once you have that done, you want to come back and put some paint on it as well. Now, what I want to do is just kind of give a brief description on how we're going to loosely secure our base plate before we put it up. So what we're going to do is take a handle nut and you can see there's a thread and knot on the back, which a bolt can thread into. That's going to go through the access hole in lineup with the holes in the frame here. So once we are holding our base plate up, what we're going to do is take a bolt and a split lock washer, put it through the base plate and loosely thread it into that handle nut. So pretty straightforward.Now I want to mention all of the hardware that we're going to use to secure the base plate. You're going to want to make sure to put on a drop of red lock tight. This lock tight doesn't come included, but you can pick a tube up here at etrailer. So now with an extra set of hands, you can take our base plate, Put it into position. And actually what I think I'm going to do is this smaller hole in front. Think I'm just going to take our nut and our bolt, and just kind of push it through there to help kind of hold the base plate up.It does help if you have two hands doing the handle nut. So then what we can do, let's get our nut and our bolt through the hole. Line up our handle nut. Get it started. So at this point, what you want to do is take a level, put it on the base plate and make sure that it's sitting as level as possible. So I'm going to hold that in place, and then take a 916 socket and snug up our bar bolts.Now we can take our side brackets and these are going to line up with the two holes here in the base plate. They're going to go on the inside of the base plate. Like so. We're going to take a bolt split-lock washer, put it through each of the holes there. Don't forget your lock tight. And on the other side, where the end of the bolt comes through, we're going to loosely secure a nylon lock nut. Now what we can do is, using the two holes here in the bottom of our bracket there as guides, we're going to drill out some openings here in this portion of our frame.So now we can grab our bolt, split-lock washer, put on a red-lock tight, that hardware combination is going to go through the bracket as well as in through the frame, through the holes that we drilled out. So they're going to get connected to a handle nut. We can slide through our access hole and we're just going to get both of them loosely secured for now. Line up our handle nut and get it going.Now that we have all that hardware in place, and tight. And come back with a 916 socket and snug everything down. Now what we can do is come back and torque down all of our hardware to the amount specified in the instructions.With all that hardware torque down, now I'm going to come back in with a pair of snips and just clip off the remaining portion of the handle nuts. Now, what we can do is move here to this flange where our bumper beam meets the frame, and we need to drill two holes there. That way we can put some extra bolts through there. Now be careful when you're doing this. Behind here, over here on the driver's side, there's some wiring that's relatively close, and that's why I put this thick piece of wood here. That way, if I do puncture too far, the wood will slow it down and stop it.We have our holes drilled out. Now we can take our bolts, some lock tight, flat washer, run them through. Then on the backside, we're going to take another flat washer and a nylon lock nut and get them started. Now we can go ahead tighten and torque the nuts and boltsSo at this point, I went ahead and just took our included safety cables and dealings and put the de-link around the convenience link here on our base plate, and wrap the cable around our frame. Pretty straight forward, just looped it around and connected two links down here. I did this on each side. Now what we can do is trim out our plastic grill guard here, according to the diagram in our instructions.We have it trimmed out. We can simply pre-install it the opposite way that we removed it. I can grab our plastic bumper beam cover and simply just pop this back into position. Now, at this point, it'd be a great time to install any other of your flat towing components like tow bar wiring and a braking system. And that's because while the fascia is off, we're going to have a lot more room to work and it'll make everything a lot easier during that installation process. So that's exactly what I'm going to do is move on and install our other components. However, if you're not installing those or you already have them done, what you'd simply do is trim your fascia out according to the diagram and instructions, and re-install it the opposite way they removed it. Now that the rest of the flat tow components have been installed, we can get our fascia put back on. When you're going to put it back on, you want to hold it up here. And you'll start to see you're going to hit some components on your base plate. So I just used my paint stick to mark where those components were. And then I just use a pair of snips to just snip out around those components. Once you snip out the furthest ones, you can then slide it a little bit further on. You got to get around your breakaway switch. You got to get around your safety chain connections, also your wiring in the middle.And then once we get it up in place here, we'll get closer and we can get it around our connection point on our base plate as well. And once you've got it slid into place and cleared out all of your components there at the front, we can then just reinstall our fascia in reverse order of how we removed it. And that completes our installation of Blue Ox's base plate on our 2018 Ford Edge.