Curt Trailer Hitch Receiver with Standard Drawbar - Custom Fit - Class II - 1-1/4"

Video Transcript for Trailer Hitch Installation - 2014 Subaru Forester - Curt

Today on our 2014 Subaru Forester we'll be installing the Curt Class II Trailer Hitch Receiver, part number C12100. Here's what our hitch looks like installed. As you can see, it's nice and tucked up underneath our vehicle. We'll only have a little bit of the frame sticking down here. What we do see has a nice high gloss black powder coat finish, so it gives us a very nice appearance, especially with this flange welded on the front of our receiver here. It gives it a more finished look and looks like it is there from the factory. We have these nice easy to use safety chain loops that is on a full 00:00:36 plate welded to the bottom of the frame of the hitch and our receiver, nice and strong.

Fairly large opening to give us plenty of room to attach the safety chain loops of our trailer onto. We have our industry standard 1/2 inch diameter hitch pin hole here to secure whatever hitch mounted accessory that we may have. Now this hitch features a 350 pound max tongue weight rating and a 3,500 pound max gross trailer weight rating. You'll want to consult the owner's manual of your Subaru and go by whichever number is less; you don't cause damage to the vehicle or the hitch itself. If you're using this hitch in a non-trailer application such as for a bike rack or a cargo carrier, Curt does require the use of a stabilization strap to help support the load. We have those available separately on our website.

One thing I really like about this hitch is if you look, the end of our receiver opening here actually sits behind our bumper cover a little bit here, so when you're going to load any cargo into your hatch of your vehicle, you really don't need to worry too much about running your knee or your shin into this and harming yourself. Another thing I like is because of this clearance that we have around our bumper here as far as our receiver opening and our hitch pin hole, we shouldn't run into any problems mounting most cargo carriers or bike racks onto this hitch. Now for a few measurements to better assist you in choosing any hitch mounted accessory you may need, such as a ball mount, bike rack, or a cargo carrier. You're looking at about 4 inches from the center of the 1/2 inch diameter hitch pin hole to rear-most part of the back bumper. About 14 inches from the ground to the top of the inch and 1/4 receiver opening. All right, here's our hitch.

As you can see, it is a class II inch and 1/4 receiver. We have all of our included installation hardware that we need, and then a pin and clip to secure whatever hitch mounted accessory that we may need. We got some pull wires here to get our hardware installed in the frame. Now that we've gone over what's included with our hitch we'll show you how to get it installed. We're going to start underneath our vehicle. Need to lower our exhaust down some so we have access to our frame rail on our passenger side so we can install our hardware for our hitch.

Take a support strap here to support our exhaust so it doesn't get damaged. Let's find a good spot to secure our strap. We go down around this lower control arm right here, come on over to the other side. We have about enough slack in our support strap here to just let our exhaust drop down some and to keep it from getting damaged. We have three exhaust hangers we're working with. One's right here above our strap. Spray some lubricant on it, make it slide off a bit easier for us. Now on the right side of our muffler, which is the passenger side, towards the back of it we have another one. On our left side of our muffler we have our third and final one. Use a pry bar on these to pop them off. Above where our muffler was there's this heat shield that's held in place with four bolts, 10 millimeters. Go ahead and take these out. We can discard our heat shield, we won't be reinstalling it. Directly above where our heat shield was we have three plastic plugs. We can pop these out with a flat head screwdriver, a trim panel tool, anything to get in behind it to pop it out. If we look on the driver side frame rail we'll have the same thing over there, so we can repeat the same process, minus there's no heat shield. Now our carriage bolt and spacer plates will need to go through a hole as an access hole. The instructions say to use the middle one after you enlarge it. However, if you go back over here towards the front of the vehicle on both our frame rails there's another plug; pop this one out. You can see it's a much larger hole so there's less material you need to enlarge. We're going to use that one instead. Use a grinder to do this. In our case I have a step bit. It's going to enlarge it slightly so that a plate can slide through. We'll repeat the same process on the other side now that this fits through. We're on the driver's side of our vehicle, passenger side would 00:05:31 be the same. Take one of our fish wires, come through one of our holes here; start with the back one first to make life a little easier. Our fish wire will come out this large access hole. We'll take one of our plates, stick it on the wire, push it through and thread on a carriage bolt. Push it into our frame rail, pull it on down. The other bolts will be exactly the same way. We'll just start at the back one first and work our way towards the front. Repeat the same process for the passenger side. With an extra set of hands we'll raise our hitch up now that our hardware's in place. We'll install our hex flange nuts here. Now we'll snug all of our hardware down using a 3/4 or a 19 millimeter. Now we'll torque all of our hardware to the amount specified in the instructions. That completes our installation of the Curt Class II Trailer Hitch Receiver, part number C12100 on our 2014 Subaru Forester.