Curt Custom Fifth Wheel Installation Kit for Chevy/GMC - Carbide Finish

Video Transcript for Curt 5th Wheel Kit Installation - 2008 GMC Sierra

Today on our 2008 GMC Sierra, we'll be installing the Curt custom fifth wheel installation kit, part number C16418-204. Now, here's what our rails look like installed. These rails will work with industry-standard fifth wheel adapters and goose neck adapters. They will fit, depending on the application, on the wide ones, the middle ones, or if you're using a gooseneck adapter, the middle ones right here. They are constructed of a durable steel construction with a durable carbide finish powder coat, which will give us many years of rust and corrosion-free service. Also, our bolts are coated in a zinc material, so you don't have to worry about your bolts rusting out either, making sure your fifth wheel rails will stay in place while you're towing your trailer. Now, what I like about this kit compared to other brands on the market is that our rails do not stick up very high compared to other ones, giving us full access to our truck bed, so if we wanted to lay something down flat, we don't lose much of our height capacity.

Now that we've gone over some of the features of our Curt rails, we'll show you how to get them installed. All right, to begin our installation, we've already removed our spare tires so we have room to get up underneath the truck to install our hardware and both of our rear wheels. You don't have to do that, but for video purposes we did that so you can get a better idea what's going on. Now we've already made our measurements in our bed here for our front rail, for our bed length. They're two different measurements if you have a long bed or a short bed; make sure you use the right measurements for your truck. You get the measurement from the rear edge of the bed. Now, we'll just make sure our rail is centered in our truck bed.

What we're going to do is take a paint marker, we'll mark our appropriate holes. It's the center front hole and all four of our outermost holes. Okay, at this point, I like to point out that your truck bed won't look like ours more than likely. Ours had a gooseneck previously installed and then an underbed fifth wheel system, so we'll just get our rail out of the way and you can see our paint marks. We use a centerpunch here on our paint marks, and we'll drill a pilot hole. We'll do the same for all five of our holes. All right, if you look underneath our truck bed here, where our hole is where our gooseneck hitch used to be, you see that there's a segment of our exhaust heat shield that's already cut out.

In order to install this product, we have to remove a majority of the exhaust heat shield. With this section already gone behind this cross-member, we'll remove the other section right here, cutting along this edge, and back over here, so it'll give us plenty of room to work. We'll just use a cut-off wheel. If you like, you can use tin snips. Now we'll just take our frame brackets, line up the holes, and make sure the holes we drilled in the bed line up with the hole in the frame bracket. We'll check it out on the passenger side as well the same way.

Okay, now that we've verified that our holes line up, we're going to enlarge them to the final size. Use a step bit first and then finish it off with a 9/16 drill bit. Okay, we'll slide our rail back in position now. Drop down our two-inch-long carriage bolts through all of our holes. Now on our outermost holes, they go down through our channel here in our bed, we'll slide in a spacer plate. This will help prevent our bed corrugation from getting crushed and getting pulled on up. Two screws here we need to remove, one's a 10 millimeter and one's like a T-25 Torx bit. There should be a third one over here, but our truck doesn't have it. We'll just remove these. These two, here and here, we'll use to reinstall our electrical connector to the new bracket we're installing. That one, you just keep; you don't need it anymore. Okay, here's the module that we disconnected. In case you're wondering, this is actually your brake controller. Then here is our bracket that we're going to attach it to. Now, you won't have this if your truck doesn't have a factory brake controller installed on it. We'll just take our bracket here, line it up the appropriate way, and then we'll take our screws, run them on through in there, and we'll tighten those down. Okay now we'll take our 3/4"x2"-long bolt, go through the bracket we installed in the brake controller, place on our 3/4" flat washer, take our bracket and go through right here in the big hole in the frame. Okay, now we'll take our frame bracket, slide it in position. Make sure we go through the bottom hole. Then we'll thread on our flange nut. Let's get this loosely started for right now. Now we'll take our large bolt leader, go through our large-diameter hole here, feed it through our frame until it pops out on the back side. I'll take on our flat washer here, so our smaller-sized one, and we'll thread on our shorter 3/4" bolt. Then we'll pull it through our frame. Okay, we're going to take our pull wire off now and we'll install our flange nut. Now that we have our driver's side frame bracket loosely in place, we'll repeat the same process for the passenger's side. Now we'll place our rear rail into position. We're going to use our fifth wheel head to position our back rail in the proper location. All right, after we've made sure that our rail is squared in position with our bed sides and the rear of our bed, we'll make our appropriate marks using our paint marker again. We'll do the rearmost spot in the center, and, unlike our front rail, we'll do the one closest to the outermost hole on both sides. Okay, with those marked, we can now take our head out of the way, center punch our marks, and we'll drill out our holes. Pilot hole made, we'll enlarge it out. We'll do the same for the other four holes. Now we'll drop down our hardware. Now we'll just drop our fifth wheel head back in place. Okay, this will help hold the rails in position while we tighten down all of our hardware underneath. All right, for our middle bolt locations in our rail, we'll slide in a steel spacer so our bed doesn't get crushed, we'll place on a flat spacer here, and then we'll thread on our flange nut. This is on our front rail. Our rear rail is exactly the same way. Okay, for our rear rail, because our bolt comes down through the raised section of our channel, we're going to have one of these spacers here, the U-shaped ones, come up. This will prevent our bed from being crushed. Then we'll have our lock underneath, and then we'll thread on our nut. We'll do the same for all four of the bolts that go through the sides on our rear rail. Okay, now that we have our back rail bolted in place to our frame bracket, we'll do the same for our front rail, except we're not going to have the spacer between our bed and the frame bracket. We'll just have our spacer here on the bottom side of our frame bracket and our nut. Okay, now we'll tighten down our hardware starting with our rails-to-bracket hardware first using a 3/4" wrench. Okay, with all of our hardware now snugged down by hand, we'll do the same process for the other side. Okay, now we'll snug down our frame brackets using an 1-1/8 socket. Now, right above our big bolt in our front of our frame bracket we have this smaller hole. We're going to use our frame bracket as a guide and drill out a 1/2" hole here to install our last remaining hardware. Okay, now we'll enlarge this out to 1/2". Okay, now we'll take our 1/2" carriage bolt lead and our 1/2" carriage bolt . These are the short carriage bolts; we already used all the other ones. Go through our hole, and it'll come out the back of our frame. We'll slide on our plate here, and we'll thread on a carriage bolt. Then we'll stick it inside our frame and pull it on through. Take off our bolt lead, and we'll put on our nut, and we'll snug it on down now. We're going to do the same for the other side. Okay, now we'll torque all of our hardware down the amount specified in the instructions. Okay, with all of our hardware torqued underneath, we'll now torque our frame brackets to the frame. That completes our installation of the Curt custom fifth wheel installation kit, part number C16418-204 on our 2008 GMC Sierra.