Reese Quick-Install Custom Installation Kit w/ Base Rails for 5th Wheel Trailer Hitches

Video Transcript for Reese Quick Install 5th Wheel Base Rail Kit Installation - 2019 Ram 2500

Hello, neighbors. It's Brad here at etrailer. And today, we're taking a look at the Reese Quick-Install Custom Installation with Base Rail Kit for a 2019 Ram 2500. If you plan on towing a fifth wheel trailer and you don't have the OEM tow package or puck package as they call it where you can just drop in your fifth wheel, your alternatives are going to be generally rails. And these are a great example of something that allows you to have your fifth wheel hooked up. And the Reese Quick-Install comes with brackets that are specifically for your Dodge, and that's gonna make it a little bit easier to get installed.

And there is gonna be drilling required, obviously, as you're gonna have to pass some carriage bolts through the bed. But really, overall, it's not too bad. The brackets use factory weld nuts located on the frame, so it really gives you a good, you know, at least reference point to get those mounted up and know that everything's aligned. 'Cause really, it comes down to making sure that these are set up nice and even and parallel and straight in the bed. Because once they're installed, you're gonna be hooking your fifth wheel up to it, so you wanna make sure that you're able to not only drop it in easy but also take it out.

Now, these rails come into an ISR standard, which just basically means that a lot of different brands of fifth wheels are gonna be able to drop in. And that way, once you have these in place, you're gonna be able to drop that fifth wheel in, hook up to your trailer, and hit the road. But whenever you're not using it, it's super easy to just unpin, pull your fifth wheel out. (hardware clanking) (hardware thuds) And the great part is it doesn't take up a whole lot of bed space once you don't have your fifth wheel installed. The kit is going to have the two rails as well as the hardware and the brackets to get it all attached to your truck.

And the rails have a nice black powder coat finish on 'em, so it's gonna hold up long term. They're gonna live in your bed, so even if you don't have a tonneau cover covering 'em up, they're gonna hold up to that weather long term. And the same goes for the brackets that you're gonna be mounting up on the frame. Now, there's no drilling required on the frame. But obviously, drilling through the bed, it's not too terribly hard to do.

But you do wanna make sure that you have a long 9/16 drill bit because portions of it require you to drill through the bed and then through the bed sill, so it does take a longer drill bit to do that. And you might wanna have a step bit as well to accomplish dropping in. There's some spacer tubes that go through here that you are gonna need to make inch and an eighth diameter hole, so make sure you have that ready. But other than that, I'm gonna walk you through the installation to make sure you get yours installed. And within a few hours, you should be able to get this all in place. There's a few places that do get tricky as far as just space, but the general concept of it is fairly easy. So let's go ahead and get those rails installed on your Ram. Now, the first thing that we wanna do before we get installing is get our spare tire out of the way. So if you need to, you can go ahead and lower that as well as taking your heat shield off, which will be bolted up. Our neighbor today already had that removed for us, making it a little bit easier for me. If you have plastic wheel well liners, I've found that sometimes removing them does make it easier to get access to the frame. It's not always necessary. Sometimes, you can kinda peel it back. But something that I always do is lower down the exhaust. That's gonna give us just a little bit of wiggle room. The Ram exhaust tend to not move too much even after taking it off of our isolator. But just that wiggle room gives us a little bit more when getting our hardware in place. So to get these pried off, just a nice soapy, water solution. You can soak that down. And with a pry bar, we'll pry it off of the isolator. (hardware clanging) And just this little bit of movement should be enough to really help us out long term. And while we're under the truck, we're also gonna want to loosen up some wire loom as well as our brake line brackets that are attached to the driver side frame rail. You're gonna see they're just kinda snapped in with some plastic clips, and this is gonna give us access to get our hardware and our brackets in place. So I'm using a trim panel tool. You're just gonna wanna kinda pry this out to where it's loose. So these trim panel tools work really well. If not, you can use a flathead screwdriver. So go through, find those plastic push-in fittings and just separate those. (pushpin popping) (pushpin popping) So now, at this point, head up into your bed. Grab one of your rails. And I use a chalk marker, you can use really anything that's gonna denote where our measurement's gonna be. And we're gonna be measuring from the lip of the bed. We're not using the tailgate. So from this edge here, depending if you have a short box or a long box, there's gonna be a measurement that's in the instruction manual that you're gonna wanna follow. But if you have a spray-in liner like we do today, you're gonna wanna kind of account for that by adding an eighth of an inch to that measurement. So what I'm gonna do first is take our measurement that we have. And I'm gonna just run my tape measure back and just make a few lines across our corrugation. And that's gonna give us a nice line to get our rail in place. (distant machinery humming) (tape measure rustling) (tape measure scraping) So now, we're just gonna take our rail and line up our marks to the edge of that. And it's nice to have this chalk marker. This will come off with water. So these lines, the pink paint will go away, it's not a big deal here. But that way, we can always make sure that we're squared up across. Now, at this point, what you're gonna wanna do is kinda eyeball and get this as centered as possible. And then, from there, take your tape measure and you're gonna find a reference point that's equal on both sides. So you can use the wheel well. There's also this line here in the bed that's a good reference mark. And we're just gonna measure that side to side. Mine's coming up with right about 2 1/2, pretty close to that. So we'll see on the other side, and then we'll bump it back as necessary to make sure that it's even. All right. (tape measure cracking) So I got about 2 9/16 roughly. Yours may vary, so don't use that measurement. Make sure you're double checking that it's even. And this is one of those steps where you take your time because this kinda determines the rest of the installation. So you wanna make sure it's perfectly, you know, nice and square in the bed and also side to side. So now that I have it in place, I'm gonna hold it and I'm gonna just kinda go around the outline here. Just in case we bump it or something, we at least have a reference mark to go back to, and that's gonna just take away having to remeasure. So now, at this point, you can either grab a punch, you can use whatever pen you were using to mark the holes, and it's gonna be specific to this. So double check your instructions, but we're gonna be using the furthest towards the outside holes here towards the end of the bed. And then, we're gonna be using the closest inside ones here towards the cab. There's also gonna be a hole that's gonna be in the center towards the bed as well. So go ahead, and I'm using a punch, it just kinda helps get that drill bit started a little bit later on. And line it up perfectly in the center. Get your punch. Now, on a bedliner like this, it may or may not help us here but there is a little dimple that I can see. And I believe at some point, this truck might have either had a different rail kit or they attempted to install it. So I already have a few holes, so if you see extra, those we're there previous. So just make sure that you have it nice and centered, again, 'cause this is gonna determine how well it bolts up. (hardware clunking) (punch snapping) So now, we'll come back with an eighth-inch drill bit, and we're just gonna drill through the marks that we've made. (tool whirring) (tool clanking) Now, as I mentioned previous, I do believe this had a rail system at some point that might've been different. Some of the holes aligned. This one is already out, and this one we won't be using. So go ahead and just drill out the marks that you have. And then, we're gonna head underneath with our frame brackets to make sure everything lines up. So now, you're gonna wanna grab your brackets that are included in the kit, and they are side specific. So you can see there's an angle here. That's gonna go towards the back tailgate of the truck. And we're gonna be using right above our sway bar end links here. You're gonna see weld nuts. Now, since these are exposed on the frame, sometimes they can get a little tricky for the hardware to thread in just because of rust and corrosion buildup. So what I'd recommend doing is take your hardware, make sure that it passes through fairly easily. If it starts to bind up, what you wanna do is get a little bit of penetrating oil, spray it in there. And you can use a tube brush. You can use a tap if you're careful. But the main thing is clearing this out for our hardware to be able to pass through. So I'm just gonna kinda clean this out and make sure that our hardware goes through. And another way you can do it is if it's not binding up too much, take your hardware and a 3/4-inch socket and just kinda run that through, and it should help clear it out as well. But once we get these cleared up, we're gonna loosely put our bracket in place, and we're gonna check to make sure that the alignment of that eighth-inch hole that we drilled is going to align with the top portion of our bracket. So I'll get this cleaned up, and then start hand threading our hardware in. Also, make sure that you put your conical tooth washer in place as well. And there's little teeth on the washer. Make sure those are biting into that bracket. And as I mentioned, we're not gonna tighten it down completely. We're just gonna wanna have this held in place. And once we kinda get it to where we're happy, we're gonna hold this up like flush against the frame rail and look from underneath and make sure that eighth-inch hole is aligned with our bracket. There's a little bit of play in the bracket until you tighten it down, so you wanna press it against the frame and also up towards the bed, and you should have that hole in that elongated hole of the bracket. So make sure that, that is aligning properly. And also, we're gonna be enlarging that hole. So mine sits a little bit forward here. So just when I drill it out, I'm gonna make sure that I'm getting that drilled out to where it's gonna fit through our bracket perfectly. And make sure you take your bracket and go to the other side of the vehicle and check for that alignment of your pilot hole. And once you're happy with that, you wanna take those brackets out. We're gonna be drilling 9/16 holes to get our carriage bolts to pass through. We're gonna focus on row one, which is gonna be the one that's closer to the tailgate. So as you can see, there's the pre-existing holes. Here's our eighth-inch, but this is 9/16, and you can see our carriage bolt's able to pass through. So I recommend grabbing one of these. You might notice the rail kit actually has separate hardware than the custom bracket. So it says it's optional, I prefer to use the carriage bolt, makes it a lot easier to tighten this down long term, so have this handy. And as I enlarge this, you can use a drill bit. You can use a step bit. It's kind of up to you, but just double check to make sure that this is passing through, and then you're good. So I'm gonna go ahead and start getting this drilled out. (tool whirring) (bolt clanking) Perfect. Once you get that one done, we're gonna do the center hole, and then the further outside hole. So go ahead and get those drilled out. (tool whirring) (tool thuds) (bolt clanking) Now, the row two or the holes that are closer towards the cab will actually get drilled out a little bit larger but only on the bed. So this surface here is gonna have an inch and 7/8 hole, so using a step bit is a great way to accomplish that. And you can actually start by drilling a 9/16 and going all the way through because this will go through the lower bed sill. And what we're doing with this larger hole up top is allowing our pipe spacer to eventually drop in, and it's gonna sit in that bed sill below. And then, our carriage bolt's eventually gonna go through this. So we need to make sure we don't drill all the way down that inch and 7/8. Otherwise, this is gonna drop through. But having that 9/16 bolt means once we get our rail in place, it's gonna tighten down. So go ahead, get those drilled out. And once you've made all your drill marks or drilled through your bed, you're gonna go through with a file, kinda knock those burrs down. (file rasping) And then, vacuum up any of the metal shavings you may have. And then, any raw or exposed metal, you can see these were done a little bit ago, and they're already starting to rust up a little bit. So to prevent that from happening, I use a black paint marker. You can use spray paint too. Just coat any of that raw metal. That way, it doesn't turn to rust long term. (distant machinery humming) So now, at this point, we got the holes drilled. You can go ahead and get your side brackets put back in and loosely tightened in place. And that's gonna be creating a mounting point for our rail. So at this point, we're gonna take our we pipe spacers here. (spacer clanging) Drop these in. (spacer clanging) And then, we're gonna get our rail put in place. And then, we're gonna pass our large carriage bolts through, making sure they go through the bed sill as well. (hardware clanging) (bolt clanging) So now that we have our row two long carriage bolts in place, we're gonna go ahead with the row one and get these mounted up. Now, anywhere where there's a gap in the corrugation, you'll see here I can kinda get my finger through, which is gonna be all of these up front, we wanna make sure it doesn't crush the bed as we tighten. So in the hardware kit that comes with the rails, we're gonna take these block spacers, and you can kinda just feed 'em in, you know, however you want. They should slide in pretty easily. And then, take your carriage bolt from the kit and pass this down. And we're gonna do that for all the locations. Again, and that's just gonna keep that nice and even here, and you'll see that it's a little bit wide for the corrugation. So even if you put it in at long ways like this, the main thing is we're not crushing our bed. (bolt clanging) So underneath, you're gonna need your conical tooth washers, some spacers, and your nuts. So the center one here, pretty easy. Since we have that spacer, there's really no gap that this can hold that up. So I went ahead with my conical tooth washer and my half-inch nut and tightened that down. The same goes for our long carriage bolt that went through that pipe spacer on the driver side, super easy. Passenger side is tricky because it does come into where that exhaust hanger bracket is. So the best bet that I've found is to actually go up top with the carriage bolt, pull up. You're gonna need to try to get this washer threaded in as well as the nut. And once you get it started, you can kinda tighten it from the top, it'll cinch it up. The problem is the nut sits against the metal here, so it's kinda tricky to get a wrench on. You can kinda get it started with your fingers. But what I've found to make it a little bit easier is just take a pry bar and just kinda wedge here, and it's gonna give you just enough space to where you can kinda get a wrench in there and tighten that down. But it is kind of a tricky one. Now, as far as our side brackets, these we're gonna use two spacers. So since they're still loose, what we'll do is, well, we'll take our U-shaped spacer. And that's gonna go on the top portion here, (hardware clanking) kinda close that gap up. And then, on the bottom, we're gonna be using a flat spacer here, our conical tooth washer, and then our nut. Now, sometimes this can get tricky threading it 'cause it's gonna wanna push those carriage bolts up. So if you need to, if you're doing this by yourself, you can put a weight or something heavy up top to kinda keep that in place so you can start threading it. I've also used super glue and just kinda glued that carriage bolt portion. It's not the best option, but if you're by yourself, it's gonna allow you to kinda get it started. And as far as the plate spacer and our conical tooth washer, you can wrap tape around this to kinda keep it one piece. It makes it a little easier to do, especially 'cause up in this frame rail, it gets pretty tight. So that way, you're not having to hold both of them at the same time. So as you can see, I just dropped my washer. So I'm gonna tape mine up. That way, I can hold this with one hand, and then get this started with the other. So now that this is one piece, I can just slide this up over it. And that's the thing too is if you can get your plate spacer and your washer in place, sometimes if this is threaded all the way down, it's actually you can use that to push it against the carriage bolt to kinda keep it in place. There's not a whole lot of excess thread here, so you're gonna have to kinda really try to get a few of 'em started. So just be patient here. And you're gonna be doing this on both sides, so hopefully after you do the first one, you'll kinda get a good grasp of it. So as you can see here, I don't have a lot of that thread poking through. And this is where it's definitely helpful to have either someone pushing up top or that weight. But I was able to pull a little bit out with my nail, so I'm gonna go ahead and get this nut started. So now, at this point, once you get all your hardware in place, you're gonna snug it down with a 3/4-inch socket. This is gonna keep our rail in place. We're not gonna torque it down yet, but you do want it to where it's not gonna move. So go ahead and get all your hardware tightened down. (tool ratcheting) (tool clanging) Now, at this point, you're gonna wanna grab your fifth wheel base, and this is where we're gonna get the measurement for the front rail. If you have multiple ones, you're gonna wanna test fit 'em to make sure that you get a nice, even spot. We have ours here. So what I'll do is I dropped it into our installed rear rail. I'll lift this up, slide our rail into place, and get this to drop in. (shoes scraping) (hardware clunking) So with our rail dropped in place, what I'm gonna do is kind of push our fifth wheel towards the back, and then our rail towards the front to give it a nice, tight fit. If you need to, you can use a dead blow hammer to kinda knock this back. You can just push on it. But the main thing is we're getting this to where it's nice and tight but not too tight. That should put it at a good threshold to when once it's installed, we should be able to just drop it in. There's no perfect way to figure this out, but the main thing that we found is if you pull this back, push that forward, that's gonna get you pretty close. But we do need to make sure that we're even on both sides. It can kinda sway one side to the other. So go ahead and take those measurements just as we did before and make sure it's even. Now that we're nice and even on both sides, we'll go ahead and make our marks. We're gonna be using the third hole towards the middle, on the front and back, and also on both sides. And then, we're gonna use this back tab here closer to the cab. So go ahead and mark that as well. And with those marked out, we'll go ahead get our base out of the way, move our rail, and then we're gonna start drilling those out with the pilot holes just as we did before. (tool whirring) (drill bit rasping) So now, we'll use our 9/16 drill bit to enlarge these. Again, have your carriage bolts handy. And that way, you can test it to make sure they work. (tool whirring) (tool whirring continues) So now, we'll go through just like we did before. File these down, vacuum up our shavings, and then we'll just throw some paint around those raw edges. (file rasping) Now, you can go ahead and put your rail in place. Take your carriage bolts and drop them through. And since these are on the raised portion of the corrugation, you don't need to worry about a spacer. But this rear one, just as we had in the our rail on the backside there, just a U-shaped spacer should kinda keep that corrugation from crushing. So we'll head underneath the truck, and we're gonna grab our other brackets where we're gonna get those bolted up. Now, onto I would think the most tedious portion of the install, and that's getting these brackets in place. Now, it is side specific. We're on our passenger side, and these tabs are gonna go up to where they bolt into the carriage bolts we passed through. And then, these are gonna bolt into weld nuts on the frame. But you're gonna see, we have a large wire here that's gonna be just like the ones that we previously removed. So go ahead, pop that off. And we're gonna have to slide the bracket kind of behind this also while aligning this up with those carriage bolts that we passed through. So just kinda slide this in first. (hardware thudding) And the passenger side is definitely easier than the driver side because it gets pretty tight there. So this should align with these weld nuts. So I'm gonna go ahead, grab my hardware, and kinda get those at least started, making sure that these stay in place here. Now, before we get our weld nut bolts put in place, that's gonna cinch it up pretty tight. We need to put our U-shaped spacers in the bed corrugation, so it doesn't crunch down. So slide those in. (hardware clanking) So as you raise this up, get your U-shaped spacers in place and kind of press that up. Then, I put my long spacer there. I'll go ahead take my conical tooth washer and my nut, and get that started. (hardware clinking) Just make sure those U-shaped spacers don't pop out of place. And then, on this side, I'm just gonna be using my conical tooth washer and a nut to get that tightened down. And with that started, we can go ahead and take our bolts with our conical tooth washer that go into the weld nuts here, and you may have to kinda pry on this bracket a little bit to get it aligned. It's pretty tight here. If you need to, you can put a flathead screwdriver and kind of use the other hole to get one started, and that's gonna help us get the other one in place. I was able to get this one kinda started, and that's gonna help us, I think, get this one. But I'm gonna grab a screwdriver and kinda wedge that, so we can get that started. (hardware clanking) (tool rattling) Now, just as the outside ones, I do recommend kinda cleaning these weld nuts too to kinda get these started. But to get these aligned, what helped me, I actually took a 3/4-inch socket and tightened up the top bolts here from our carriage bolts. And that kinda drew it up to make it a little bit easier to get that started. So if you need to do that, go ahead and tighten that up a little bit. Once you get this one in place, we'll go ahead and repeat on the other side. So our middle bolt, we just get that tightened down with a washer. I actually ran out of spacers between both kits, so I wasn't able to use one here. But because we have that spacer on the other side, this should cinch down just fine. And then, our driver side got a little bit tricky. Now, it's the exact same concept as the passenger side. You just have a lot more that you're dealing with as far as brake lines and some of that wire loom. So make sure that's all outta the way. And kinda getting the plate in set where it needs to be was kinda tricky, but then also aligning those bolts was also not exactly fun. But once I got it started, I got that tightened down. So at this point, we're gonna go back and start torquing down our hardware with our torque wrench. Now, the torque wrench, we're gonna be using two different torque settings, and you're gonna refer to your instruction manual. The hardware, when it changes, it's two different settings, so just adjust to that. Now, the one that was kinda tricky to tighten here by the exhaust or the hangar there, I might end up using a crow's foot. I think that's gonna be our best option. I can kinda get in there, but it's pretty tight there so do the best that you can. All the other ones should be fairly easy to get to. You might need some extensions to get some to the ones on the driver side as you probably had to use to tighten it. But go through, get all of your hardware tightened down properly. Now, as far as sequence, we wanna make sure that we're doing the ones that bolt up to the rails first, and then we'll do the side ones that bolt into the frame. So I'm gonna go through, get all this torqued down. (tool beeping) (tool clicking) So all of our hardware is now torqued. We need to make sure we get our exhaust put back in the isolator. We're also gonna get our heat shield put back up and our spare tire, load up our fifth wheel, pin it in, hook up our trailer, and then hit the road. And that was a look and installation of the Reese Quick-Install Custom Installation Kit with Base Rails on a 2019 Ram 2500.