Curt Custom 5th Wheel Installation Kit for Ford - Carbide Finish

Video Transcript for Curt 5th Wheel Kit Installation - 2015 Ford F-250 Super Duty

Shane: Hi, I'm Shane with etrailer.com. Today I'm going to walk through how to install the Curt Custom Fifth Wheel Installation Kit on your 2015 Ford F250 Super Duty.This is going to allow you to pull a fifth wheel trailer or add a fifth wheel hitch in the bed of your truck. This kit is going to work with many different fifth wheel hitches. As you can see, it's going to be an above bed rail kit. Installation side, it's very simple. The only holes that need to be drilled is just the hardware that's going down through the bed to hold the rails down.This kit is going to allow you to work with many different fifth wheel hitches.

Another great thing about it is maybe you pull fifth wheels through the week at work. Maybe on the weekends, maybe you have a gooseneck trailer camper, and an easy way to convert your fifth wheel rails and allow you to pull that gooseneck trailer is with the Curt Spider and this is what it's going to look like. It's going to drop right into place in your rails. Again, pin it the same locations and you're ready to hook up your gooseneck.It's going to be a steel construction with a carbide black powder coat finish, so they're really going to hold up well against rust and corrosion. You can see even though they're in the bed of the truck, they're still going to give us plenty of access.

We want to throw some plywood back here, drywall. We're still going to be able to get that stuff in here.They're only going to stick up from the bed about an inch to an inch and a half from the top, so again, plenty of bed space. With these, we can take our fifth wheel out and these would be the only things that we had that remain inside the bed. These holes here are going to be your pin holes that hold your hitch down to the rails. These holes here are going to be for different size, weight rated pitches.It's also going to come with frame brackets.

These are going to be custom fit. It's not going to require any holes to be drilled. It's going to fit into factory holes already in the frame. These are going to be a steel construction also with a carbide black powder coat finish.Now that we've gone over some of the features of this rail kit, let's go ahead and show you how to get it installed. To start your installation, if you have a plastic drop in bed liner, you're going to need to take that out because we want our measurement to be on the bed, not on the mat itself or on a insert.

If you have a spray in bed liner, what we're going to do is we're going to measure to the edge of our back rail.Our customer just bought this truck and it actually had a previous above bed rail kit in place, so it already had the holes drilled, but I'm going to walk you through what you would do if you we're drilling the holes into a new bed. You're going to measure from the edge of your bed per the measurements in the instructions up to this edge of this rail, this very front rail. Now if you have a spray in bed liner, you're going to add about a 16th to an eighth inch onto that for the thickness of the spray in bed liner. Once you get this measurement, you're going to mark this center hole.Then you're going to measure between your wheel wells and you want to measure from this edge out and from this edge out and you want to make sure it's equal distance so that your rail is centered in the bed. Once you get your holes marked, you're going to take a step bit. You want to make sure you check underneath before you do any drilling, make sure you're not going to be drilling into anything.Take a step bit. I'm sorry, a small drill bit, and you're going to drill the center of the holes that you marked and then what you're going to do is you're going to move the rail. You're going to open up to nine sixteenths. The holes you're going to be drilling are your two outside holes on the ends of the rail and the center hole towards the center of the bed or towards the back of the bed.The next thing you want to do, is you want to come down and you want to mount your side rail brackets or your frame rail brackets. We went ahead and dropped them all down here, lined up our holes. You want to make sure and double check to make sure that the holes you drilled in your brackets are lining up with the holes, or I'm sorry, in your bed or lining up the holes in the bracket. You're going to have a large bolt that comes through a factory hole in the frame here. You're going to have a smaller one here and then a smaller one back here.Now that we've shown you what it's going to look like, let's go ahead over to the other side of the vehicle and we'll show you actually how to put it in. This is what our side frame brackets are going to look like. There's going to be a difference between driver and passenger. You'll notice that these flanges, these want to be facing out away from the frame. You want the single one towards the front, the double ones towards the back.You'll notice the holes here. These are going to be our factory holes in the frame that we're going to be running our bolts through. The hardware that we're going to be using, this is going to be our larger bolt that I had mentioned. It's going to be coming through the center from the inside, putting on the bolt, putting that washer on, and we're going to feed it from the inside of the frame out through the bracket, and then you're going to put on a large nut.Our two smaller bolts are going to have a spacer block and these are going to be carriage bolts, are going to have a spacer block. You're going to put the spacer block on and they're going to feed through the two smaller holes that I had mentioned before on the outside flat part of the bracket.For our passenger's side, what's going to be different about is there's airbags on this. There's a large bolt where this bolt has to go in through our frame that has to come out. This one has to replace it, so let's go ahead and take that one out now.This is going to be our bolt that we needed to take out so we can utilize that hole to mount our frame bracket on. Now the large bolt we had to remove, you'll notice this large square hole on this bracket for the air bags. Originally I had said we we're just going to be using this small square spacer. However, with the airbags installed, when I took the bolt off, this square spacer in the bolt head by itself is not going to hold the top of that bracket in place. So what I did is I took the large washer that was on the old bolt, slid it over top of this one, put my small squares spacer on and we should be able to slide this right into place like that.Now that we got our bolts in place, our frame bracket set in place, I'll go ahead and put our nut on. This is going to be our second hole and then again, our third hole is going to be right here. Then we're going to take our spacer block, put it on our carriage bolt, we're going to come from the inside of the frame rail the same way we did this one, right through the hole and then we'll put our nut on the outside. We're going to do that on both holes.Once you get your front rail put in place. You got your bolts dropped down through, go ahead and set your hitch in place. That's going to give you your alignment for your rear rail. As I mentioned before, our holes we're already pre-drilled, but this is how you would do it if they weren't.Set your hitch in, line up your rail. Again, take your measurement from side to side to make sure that it's not twisted one way or the other. Two outside holes on the end of the rail and this very back hole. When drilling your center hole in this back bracket it may be a good idea to go ahead and lower your spare tire so you don't drill a hole into the tire.Now that we have our rear rail drilled out, we have our hardware put in place, we can go hide. go down underneath and put the rest of our hardware on. So if you'll notice, there's a gap right here. Where the corrugation raises, you're going to have a U-shaped spacer like this. It's going to sit around the bolt and as to keep that corrugation from smashing flat when we tighten it in place. We're going to take these, put them in place. Again, you want to make sure they're going to go around the bolt and we're going to put a square spacer block and then a flange nut.You're going to repeat that process for all your hardware, all remaining hardware. Once you have all your hardware installed, you're going to tighten and torque it all to the specifications in the instructions. You're going to start by tightening the bolts coming down through the bed and you're going to tighten the frame rails to the frame.Once you have all your hardware tightened and torqued to the specifications in the instructions, if you have a drop in bed liner, go ahead and place that back in and you're just going to cut around your rails. Once you get that done, you're ready to go.Again, I'm Shane with etrailer.com. I hope this video has helped you, whether you're still deciding or installing the Curt Custom Fifth Wheel Installation Kit on your 2015 Ford F250 Super Duty.