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Custom brackets reduce the amount of drilling and time required to install your fifth-wheel trailer hitch. Brackets, base rails and hardware included.
Features:
Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Conner: Hey guys, this is Connor here at etrailer.com. Today. We're going to be taking a look at the Reese Quick-Install Fith Wheel Rail Kit for our 2018 Chevrolet Silverado 2,500. Our Reese above that brace rails here are going to provide an attachment point for a fifth wheel trailer hitch however, we could also use a gooseneck plate if we have a gooseneck trailer. Now, the great thing about these Reese base rails are, they're going to accept fifth wheel hitches from a wide variety of different brands. Whatever hitch you have that uses industry standard above-bed base rails they're going to work with these Reese rails.As we can see here, we have the different slots which are going to accommodate some of the different fifth wheel hitches reissues as these two middle ones right here, I think some of the cuts 00:00:42 use the outside ones are the huskies and then our gooseneck plates actually mount with these two slots right here.
Now, once we have our fifth wheel hitch or gooseneck plate installed in one of these slots, we want to take our standard hitch pin and clip here, just simply insert it in these little holes right here, and we can secure it on the other side with our clip. We'd want to do that for all four sides of our fifth wheel hitch per gooseneck plate.So if we take a look at the finish of our base rails here, you see, we have a nice glossy powder coat finish. Now this powder coated finish is going to be super durable, so we don't have to worry about any rust or corrosion issues, and it's also going to have a nice clean look so it doesn't look too bad when it's sitting in the back of our truck bed. Now, the rails are fairly low profile so we don't lose too much of our truck bed and we can still use it to haul around items.So as we can see here on the side, these are going to be our frame brackets. Now, the great thing about this Reese kit, that the frame brackets are a custom fit, which means we don't need to drill any holes into the frame of our truck, which is especially important when we have a newer truck like this 2018 model here.
Now, keep in mind. We do need to drill a few holes in the bed but that's going to be pretty much unavoidable for any above bed installation kit. So in regards to the installation process, this is going to be something that you can do at home by yourself in your driveway, however, this is one of the more challenging installation processes you can complete at home, but with just a little bit of time and patience, you should be able to figure this out you shouldn't have too many problems.Now we are going to struggle a little bit with getting the base rail bolts that attach to the frame brackets here because they're just in a bad spot and there's not a lot of room to work however, if we just keep at it and again, be patient, we shouldn't be able to get this done ourself and save us some money. So now that we've gone over some of the benefits and features, let's show you how to jump right in and get this installed yourself. To start our installation today we want to take one of our base rails here and set it into position in the truck.
Now we're going to be using the measurement supply to us in the instructions, which for this particular model is going to be 24 and five, eight inches from the edge of the bed here.So we just want to take our tape measure, want to line everything up, now we've already did our measurements beforehand, we're just going to briefly show you how this has done by yourself. So we just want to double check our measurements here, now keep in mind, if you have a spray in bed liner like our truck does, you do need to compensate for the added thickness at the end of the bed. So we just want to double and triple check our measurements before we begin drilling. So I'm just going to go along to each of these little raised sections of the bed here, check everything. And now that we know we have it the correct distance back from the end of the bed here, we want to go ahead and check that it's centered within the bed.Now we can use either the end of this little groove here, or we can use the inside of the wheel-well whichever you feel comfortable with.
So again, we're just double and triple checking our measurements here, so we make sure we have everything precise before we go ahead and start drilling. Now that we're comfortable with where we have the rail, then go ahead and take a paint marker here, wherever you have on hand that could make an indentation in this truck bed here, if you have a center punch tool, that'll work as well. There's five holes here that we need to mark and drill for the first step, we're going to be using the four second to most outside holes here, so just going to make a little paint marking, each of these, come over here.And then we also have one more in the center, we're going to be using the rear hole here, just make another little paint marking, now we can remove the rail and drill our holes. So now that we have all our holes marked, we want to go ahead and take our eighth inch drill bit here, we want to drill out the holes that we marked in those five locations. Please keep in mind we do need to check under the surface that we're drilling first to make sure that there's nothing under there that can be damaged. So now that we have our whole shoulder in the bed, we want to go ahead and take one of our frame brackets here, set it up against the frame so we can make sure the holes we drilled are going to align with the slots in the top of our frame brackets.So we're just going to take our frame bracket here with our carriage bolts that are included with the kit, we're not tightening anything down now we're just going to use it to hold it in place. So we'll take our frame bracket here, slide it up under the vehicle and we will use these holes here to hold it there. So ideally we would want to be able to look under here and see that if the holes aligned with the slots in our frame bracket however, it doesn't look like we're going to be able to see that from this angle so we're going to go ahead and take the spare tire down next and see if that gives us a better view.So now that we have the spare tire down and out of the way, we're going to go ahead and lift the vehicle back up in the air and see if we can get a better look at our holes. We're up into the vehicle, we can now just barely see our holes which are aligning with the floss in our frame brackets. So now we can go ahead and go up top and enlarge the holes. Now we're going to come over to the other side of the vehicle here again, mark our frame bracket up and check the holes to make sure they've lined up as well. So now that we have our eighth inch holes drilled and our five spots here, we've put our side brackets on the frame so we can make sure those line up the slots, we can go ahead and take our nine 16th inch drill bits and drill out the holes to the final size they need be.Now, if we have trouble getting our nine 16th bit through, we can go ahead and work our way up with a smaller bit until we reached the final size. So now that we have our nine 16 inch holes drilled in the top of the bed for our first rail, we can go ahead and install our frame brackets. Now we're going to be using these two holes here and here, and then we're going to take our hardware here, we have our bolt leader and we have our five, eight inch carriage bolts as well as our spacer blocks.So for this first step, we're going to take our carriage bolt and just thread it onto our wire leader here, thread that all the way through then we can go ahead and take our spacer block here, slip it through the open end of the wire leader, we don't want the bolt in the spacer block to go together yet because we're going to have to get on the inside of the frame here and feed this through an access hole, which is going to be directly behind this bump stop. So let's get on the inside there and show you how that's done.So now on the driver's side here, it's going to be a little harder to show you, but we want to show you the difficult side because that's probably the size you're going to struggle with. So if we move our wiring harness up here, we can see our access hole here, this is the end we're going to slip the open end of our wire leader through, and once we do that, this is where the tricky part comes into play. We're going to have to take our hands here our other free hand come on the outside of the frame rail and those two bolt holes that I pointed out earlier, we're going to want to stick our finger through there so we can try to grab the wire leader as we feed it through.Now, this part is going to take some patients and some time to new, we just have to stick with it. So I have my finger in the other side of that opening here, and I'm just sort of poking through with the leader until I get it on my finger, bam, and that was actually pretty easy, but we will struggle a little bit with the other hole because it's going the other way. So now that we have our wire leader pulled through here, show you this one, we go want to feed our spacer block and our carriage bolt through that hole. We're not going to be able to do it both together so we want to go ahead and do it separately.Fed the spacer block through there, perfect, now we can come out on the outside of the vehicle here and just sort of gently try to get the spacer block and the carriage bolt, so you can use this other hole to sort of help guide the spacer block, perfect. Now we can take our frame bracket here, now keep in mind the frame bracket for the driver in the passenger side are a little bit different so we do need to make sure we have the correct one. This kit's pretty easy because we can see the smaller interior that's going to be facing the front of the vehicle, whereas this larger end where there's more opening is going to be facing the rear.So now we're going to go ahead and try to carefully put our frame bracket up, go through the hole, just like so, you're going to hold that there and then just to hold it in place, we're going to take our other carriage bolt, we're just going to loosely place it in that hole to hold everything. Now we can go ahead and remove our wire leader here, install our serrated washer, which comes with the kit, we want to make sure the teeth are going to be facing the bracket, so I'm going to slide that over there and install our five, eighths inch hex nut and just get it hand tight to hold it in place, now we can go ahead and fish our other wire through to this other bolt hole.As you can see now we have a C cliff 00:10:42 on the bottom of the frame rail, this is going to hold our frame bracket in place that way we come around to the other side, we'll have a nice opening that we can stick her finger through and grab the pull wire. Now we can feed our wire leader through we're going to be using the rear most hole this time, so just feed it in there to give us some slack and then we're going to reach our hand around the other side of the frame rail here, try to look for it through that little hole we made earlier. This part is going to take some patients we just have to stick with it.So now we're going to show you a little trick to get this rear pull wire through this hole. Now we went on the other side of there, we fed the wire leader through so we can just barely see it sticking through here. We're going to take a set of needle nose pliers, come around on the outside and try to grab that once we got a good lead on it, pull it through and there we go.So now we're going to have to go on the other side there, feed our spacer block and carriage bolt through that opening, keep in mind, we don't have a lot of room to work with over here, so we may need to lift that wiring harness up just to get it out of our way. Alrighty, now we can come around here, try to feed it through best we can. Perfect, so now that we have the bolt through, we can go ahead and pull our pull wire off then we can take our cerated washer here again, making sure the teeth are facing the frame bracket, then we can go ahead and place our five H and snap on, just get it hand tight to hold it in place.So now that we have both of our frame brackets loosely installed, we want to come up here into the bed of the truck and we can go ahead and reposition our rear most rail here, then we're going to take four of our half inch carriage bolts, which we're included with the hardware for our rails. We're going to just simply line these up and the holes we drilled earlier, hoping that they line up with the frame brackets underneath. So we have four of them here, place those in a position and we have the last one there. Now we can go underneath and button these up with the nuts and spacer blocks we need to use.So now we're going to take our U shaped spacer blocks here, position those between the bottom side of the bed and top of our frame bracket here, this is going to help that we don't crush the bed for when we tighten our hardware down. We'll take our serrated washer here, make sure the teeth are facing up towards the hitch, we're going to follow this up with a lock washer and then finally our hex nut, so it's going to be a little tricky to get all that to hold on there while you get the nuts, let's just do one at a time, nut on there, our lock washer and then our hex nuts. We just need to get it hand tight for now, we can go ahead and repeat these same steps on this other bolt here.So the next step for the installation, we're going to need to grab the base to our fifth wheel hitch, you can take the head off if you want so it's a little bit easier to work around assuming your fifth wheel hitch has this feature. So once we have the four locking tabs lined up, keep in mind your fiscal hitch could use any one of these different locking tabs just make sure we choose the correct one. So then once we have the forward locking tabs lined up, we're going to go ahead to the rear here, we have our base rail down already and we're going to sort of roughly line it up to where we think it needs to be positioned, and then we can go ahead and lift up on our fifth wheel hitch slide our rail underneath and try to line up the locking tabs just like we have here on the front.Just like so and once we have that, I'm going to go ahead and make sure that the rail is centered within the truck bed left to right. So we'll have to do a little bit of adjustments, and take our tape measure so we can double and triple check that we have it centered. So now that we have the rear rail into position here, we want to go ahead and again, take our paint marker or a center punch tool, whichever you prefer, we're going to want to mark the holes we're going to drill. Now for the rear rail we're going to be using the four outside holes as well as the hole in the cente closest to the curb, so again, just going to pick a mark right here, here and in the back for the center. Here, here, now we can go ahead and remove the fifth drill base, the rail here so we can drill our holes.So now that we have our other set of holes drilled, we again want to come underneath the vehicle here and make sure the bolt holes are aligned with our little slot right here, and these are going to be pretty hard to see, so what I'm just going to do is just going to take my finger here sort of run it through that slot and I can feel the hole coming through with the sharp metal on the end there so, we know our holes aligned, so now we can go up top and enlarge our holes to the final size.So a little trick I just learned after we installed the first rail, when we're underneath installing our washers and nuts on these carriage bolts, on the other side they we're starting to pop up on me which made it hard to get the nut on. So what we're going to do is we're just going to simply tape the head of the carriage bolt down that way when we're installing our nut and washer it doesn't want to pop up on us. So now we're going to come back to these final set of bolt holes and repeat what we did for the other rail, which is the U shaped spacer between the bottom of the bed and the top of the frame rail, and then our combination of the serrated washer lock washer and hex nut.As we can see here on our frame bracket closest to the cab, the frame bracket for the fifth wheel hitch is actually going to be butted up against the channel here on the bottom of our bed therefore, we're not going to need one of the U shaped spacers however, we will need to put that up under the rail and on top of the bed. And now that we have all of our rails installed everything snug, we want to go ahead and set our fifth wheel hitch into position on the rails, insert the pin so we know everything fits and then we can come up and torque all of our bolts to the amount specified on our instructions.Now we're going to start by torquing the bolts that hold the base rails to the frame bracket slash bed and then we can move on to torquing the bolts that hold the frame brackets to the frame. So now that we have all of our base rail bolts torqued down to the specifications in our instructions, we want to do the same thing for our two bolts here, which hold our frame bracket to the frame. Now that we have everything installed torque down to the specifications in our instructions, don't forget we still need to re-install the rear spare tire, but after that, that's going to do it today for the Reese Quick-Install Fifth Rail Kit for our 2018 Chevrolet Silverado 2,500.
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (193 Customer Reviews)
Custom brackets reduce the amount of drilling and time required to install your fifth-wheel trailer hitch. Brackets, base rails and hardware included.
The installation instructions were detailed and clear. Did it by myself in about 4 hours. Inexpensive solution if you didn't get the 5th wheel prep package.
Received the product the very next day shipping was excellent. Boxes were well taped and secured and complete. This was installed on a 2011 Silverado 2500 HD with a 8 foot bed . My installation was straightforward ,followed the included directions , and it installed very easy. I only have two suggestions ,
Get the spare tire down and out-of-the-way and do whatever is necessary to get around the heat shield. I just cut a small section of mine away . I have done business with etrailer for about five years now. I use to price check and order everywhere off the Internet. I don't do that anymore because I always ended up back doing business with etrailer.com.
For four reasons ... Best price around, quality products, great customer service from a live person, well packaged products with the fast shipping
Fast shipping!! Installed on a new 2016 GMC Sierra 3500 Denali. Only issue was the exhaust heat shield.. It must be removed for easier access to install hardware. It takes about 3 hours to install with one person. Otherwise no issues. E Trailer is great to do business with!! Thank you
Installed on 2017 chevy 2500. Square washers for the 5/8 bolts were to big to fit through the acess holes in pickup frame. I had to fish them through a bigger hole further up the frame rail. Other than that, excellent products. Once I found etrailer, its the only place I shop for trailer products
I purchased the Reese dual jaw slider and install bracket kit. Everything arrived in three days in perfect condition. After watching the install video and reviewing the enclosed instructions I installed the assembly myself. It took approximately 4 hours . As you can see I also did additional steps, cutting the rubber bed mat to fit around the rails. Also undercoating the brackets to blend in the wheel wells. Etrailer is definitely the place to go for all your RV needs.
Kit was pretty easy to install. Definitely watch the video. Some of the bolts are in tight spaces. Overall very good kit. Well constructed.
I purchased fifth wheel hitch rails. They were worked great. We certainly put them through a strong test. Unfortunately we got stuck on a very muddy, greasy road on a hunt. The fifth wheel was leaning at an angle but the rails held! I was extremely relieved and happy that they did. Thank you etrailer.
Hi Carol.
I got the package. I hope to install next week. I’m also looking to put a 5th wheel electrical plug in the bed. 2019 Chevy 3500 with the factory prep for the wiring harness. Do you have a correct fit kit to do this?
Mike L.
10/26/2018
We do offer a 5th wheel wiring harness for your 2019 Silverado 3500. Id recommend the Hopkins # 41157, which you can see by using the link provided below. The harness plugs inline right behind the 7-way installed on your trucks rear bumper, between the trucks factory harness and the existing 7-way.
Helpful Links
Custom-Fit-Vehicle-Wiring/Chevrolet/Silverado+3500/2019/41157.html?vehicleid=201913372
Fast shipping, all good, no problems
Rail Mounting kit arrived in perfect condition, with all required attachment hardware and special bolt insertion tool. All items fit up as advertised on my 2019 GMC 2500HD std bed Sierra. Completely satisfied.
Ralph K.
1/9/2021
After a year since installation and several trips with my 5th wheel, Im still completely satisfied with this rail mounting kit, It has operated perfectly with my Andersen Ultimate Rail Mount Hitch.
The rail kit installation went smoothly. I did the complete installation alone just to see if I could complete it without any assistance from anyone. (The installation honestly took me about eight hours which included quite a few breaks!) The only difficult task for me was installing the two nuts and washers on the front two bolts on the LH Frame Bracket due to the tight clearance around the large diesel fuel tank on my truck. As some of other folks mentioned, removing the spare tire and exhaust system heat shield are a must for installing the rail kit this model truck. The quality of the components is excellent. My wife and I will be pulling our 5th Wheel to the Georgia Mountains with this hitch this weekend!
Great product! Everything fit as it should. Customer service was great they help the entire way even when ups lost part of the shipment!
Installed a Reese custom rail kit (RP50066-58) on my 2016 GMC Denali 4WD DRW. It took approximately 3 1/2 hours to get it completely installed. I had to remove the exhaust heat shield and drop the spare tire but once I did it gave me easy access to the hitch frame brackets. I found it very informative to watch the online video first and took the advise of another persons suggestion to tape over the holes in the top of the frame (it kept me from losing the nuts & washers down into the frame). I simply followed the written instructions that came with the kit and the hitch was installed with out any real issues. I will say it did come in handy to have someone to assist me with some parts of the installation (just to keep me from having to crawl in/out from under the truck to get tools etc). As a side note, if you had access to car lift it would make the installation much faster and easier. I didn't have access to one and it was a little tight but as I said it wasn't all that bad.
I would definitely recommend this product.
Frame brackets were a perfect fit and easy to install. Installing nuts on the rail's proved a little difficult on my vehicle 2018 GMC due to limited clearance over fuel tank and truck frame and exhaust shield (definitely a 2 person job). Otherwise I am perfectly satisfied with the quality of the kit and easy to follow instructions. I would recommend this kit.
Rail kit was great and etrailer was great with fast and free shipping.
Only advice: I installed this kit on my 2014 Chevrolet 3500 and I would not do it again.
I'd spend the extra money and get the RP56001-53 kit...much much easier to install
If you have time and patience, it's worth the savings. Otherwise save yourself the tight quarters of trying to get to those bolts above the frame rails.
I suspect this kit was an earlier design that was or should have been superseded by the later one.
Although the Rails won't be installed until my new truck comes in mid April, I fully expect the product to be as advertised. I was recommended to your site and product by salesman from major manufacturer of the 5th Wheel Hitch currently used.
Arnold
9/22/2014
Has been a year and Product has worked out just fine !!
Excelent product. Made the install much easier than it needed to be. The video helped a lot. Access to some of the bolts were very difficult (ones above the gas tank). Dropping the spare tire made it easier. Biggest problem was removing the heat shield as on my truck the darn Torx screws stripped. I ended up cutting most of the heat shield off. Bottom line, this is a great product, very heavy duty and very versatile.
Jason W.
6/12/2014
Still working great.
An installation of brackets are never easy due to items in the way but following the instructions made it doable
Easily ordered and delivered promptly
after getting the right fifth wheel suport kit for my 2017 chevy 2500 hd the insulation went in just as they say in the instructions thanks again etrailer for providing a product and service
Excellent product. Installation of washers and nut on front passenger rail under bed a little difficult. Probably worth the extra cost to buy the outboard brackets and longer rails. Removal of spare tire required.
Laura E.
11/8/2016
Thanks for your review, Ron. We note that removal or lowering of the spare tire is only temporary.
I really appreciated the very informative videos etrailer provided for the install on my 2015 Silverado 2500. I was able to focus my efforts on the high degree of manual dexterity required to mount the rails to my truck without the assistance of a lift. It was a very rewarding experience and I was shocked to learn the positions I could get my aging body into under that truck.
Couple of Tips from me to the next guy:
1) Use electrical tape on lead wire coil and bolt. Too nerve racking pulling on that wire and hoping it wasn't going to yank free of the bolt.
2) When you go to install the washer, lockwasher, nut combination, put a piece of duct tape over the hole in the top of the frame. When (not if) you drop the nut it will bounce off the tape rather than making the nothing but net swishing sound on it's way into your truck frame.
Really solid hitch. I'm very satisfied with the purchase.
These rails were a perfect fit on my previously used 5th wheel hitch. I am installing them myself on my 2016 GMC 3500 Sierra. However, the time it has taken, has been longer than advertised. I am stuck with three unreachable bolts. I am 63 years old with arthritis, so it is a challenge. I am very pleased with the service that e-trailer has provided me on instructions. With them, Installing the rails is a straight forward project even for this rookie. I am not pleased with the box that the rails were shipped in. It was too large a box and the rails tore the box apart. The bag of ten bolts, nuts, washers and spacers was also ripped open. Fortunately all was accounted for.
This was a nice product easy to install.
The hitch works good the only thing is it is hard to unlock because the jaws are tight. Other than that had no problems.
Mike L.
12/28/2018
If the jaws are difficult to unlock, youll want to make sure the hitch has been lubricated according to the operating instructions. Also, if the fifth wheel and the hitch arent both level, the pin box may be applying some force to the jaws, causing them to bind. Moving the vehicle a bit will usually allow the hitch to unbind.
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Steve A.
9/17/2020
Excellent