Draw-Tite Max-Frame Trailer Hitch Receiver - Custom Fit - Class IV - 2"

Video Transcript for Draw-Tite Max-Frame Trailer Hitch Installation - 2020 Ford Explorer

Hi there, Ford owners. Today in your 2020 Ford Explorer, we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install Draw-Tite's Class III 2" Trailer Hitch Receiver. And this is what our hitch looks like when it's installed. The cross tube is going to be hidden completely behind the bumper, so you're only going to see the receiver here at the back. It's a Class III 2" Trailer Hitch Receiver, so it's going to be great for all of your towing needs, whether you want to put a bike rack in it and load it up with four bikes or fully load up a cargo carrier, or if you want to hook up a pop-up camper or bring some Jet Skis to the lake with you to the weekend. It uses a five-eighths inch hitch pin and clip.

One doesn't come included with the hitch, but we have plenty available here at etrailer.com.You also notice a small hole just to the rear of our hitch pin hole and that is for a J-pin. A J-pin is similar to your hitch pin, but it will wrap around and go into the end on one side, a little J-hook, and the other side is threaded down, so it pulls it tight against anything inside the receiver, acting as an anti-rattle device. On bottom, we have hoop style safety chain loops with a very large opening that should accommodate just about every shape, size and style of safety chain. It features a 900 pound tongue weight, which is the force going down on top of the receiver. And like I mentioned earlier, you could easily put a four bike platform rack on it and fully loaded up with that or any of the cargo carriers we have available here at etrailer.com can be inserted in here and load it up to the maximum.

It also features a 6,000 pound gross towing capacity, which is how much they can pull behind it. And again, like I said before, you could have your pop-up campers with that easily.Take those with you. You could bring some medium size trailers as well with you. Now I've got some measurements for you to help you when deciding on accessories. From the center of the hitch pin hole to the edge of the rear bumper, it measures about five inches.

This is important when determining if any of your folding accessories can be placed in the upright storage position without contacting the bumper. And from the ground to the top inside edge of the receiver tube, it measures about 15 and a half inches. This is important when determining if you need to drop or rise or raise shank on any of your accessories. Now that we've gone over some of the features, let's go over the installation together so you can have the confidence to do it at home. We'll begin our installation underneath the vehicle by removing the under shield.

There are four bolts across the back here we're going to remove with a seven millimeter socket. On each side of the under shield, you'll have two nuts. We'll take those off with a 10 millimeter socket.Then at the front of your under shield, you'll have two push pins. We're going to remove those with a flat bladed screwdriver or a trim panel remover tool. You'll want to insert your blade between the head of the pin and the other side of the pin. Once you've separated them, you can pull out on the center and then the entire pin will just pop out after that. We're going to do the same thing with the other pin over here. With both pins removed, we can lower down our under shield and set it aside. We're now going to be lowering down our exhaust, but before we do, we want to put a strap in place to ensure it doesn't lower down too far and cause any damage to anything. So we're just going to hook a strap underneath and run it up just to act as a catch. To lower down your exhaust, we're going to remove the bolt that holds the hanger on, on each side.So we've got dual exhaust here, so there's our hanger and just above the top of the hanger is where your bolt will be, we'll use a 10 millimeter socket to take this bolt out. You'll want to be careful because the heat shield is near here. It can be pretty sharp. And then we're going to take the bolt off on the other side. You can see that it's loose on this side, so we're going to repeat that on the other side. We're then going to remove the hangers towards the front of the vehicle. They're closer to the center. There's one on each side. You can spray them with some lubricant to make it a little bit easier. Ours are already pretty wet from the weather outside, so we don't really need to use any. And we're just going to use our pry bar here to pry it off of the hanger, just like that. And you can see that's why we put our strap in place. We'll do the same thing here on the other side.Now that we've got all the hangers loose, we can go back to our strap. You'll want to support your exhaust a little bit and then just gently lower it down. We've got plenty of room to work there. We're now going to measure our heat shield. Now there are a couple of ways you can do this. You could take your heat shield off first and then cut or you could do it while it's on here. Since we're going to try using a hole saw, since we're going to be cutting a hole in the heat shield at about this spot, you'll want to refer to your instructions for the exact measurements from the distance of the hole. And we're going to cut a hole there. So the problem with taking it off first, if you're going to use a hole saw to cut it, is the hole saw could potentially catch and this is very sharp metal, so you could cut yourself.The other option is to take it off and just use tin snips and you have to cut a line down it to get to the hole to make the whole cutout, but that would be the safer option. We're using a one and a half inch hole saw to make this cut. You'll also want to be careful when removing that little piece. If it gets stuck, you want to use your screwdriver or something to get that out of there because it is also going to be very sharp. And you can see behind it is our access hole where our hardware is going to be passing down. We will still need to take the heat shield off now. We're going to repeat this same process on the other side before taking it off though. To remove our heat shield, there's going to be two nuts and one bolt. We're going to use a 10 millimeter socket to remove. There are then two more bolts we'll have to take out. There's one here on the side and then one just behind the tire. You can see it sticking out right there.These ones though are going to be a seven millimeter socket. At this point now, it will just pull down. You'll see there are some star cutouts, so you are going to have to wiggle it and give it a little bit of a tug to slide off of those bolts. And once it pops off of there, we'll just work it out. We'll set this one aside and then we're going to perform the same procedures on the opposite side to remove the heat shield over there. There's a bolt towards the back of the vehicle on the frame we'll need to remove using a 21 millimeter socket and we're going to remove the one on the other side as well. Next, we'll need to trim out the center of our fascia for our receiver to fit through. You'll want to refer to your instructions for the template. I've gone ahead and marked it out here, so you can see where I'm going to be cutting, and you can cut this either using a pair of snips or a cutoff wheel.I'm going to go ahead and use a cutoff wheel because it is connected to another support panel behind it and we're going to need to cut through that as well. The only thing else I recommend for you is to just double-check to make sure there's no wiring there. Depending on the options you have on your Explorer, there may be wiring that you need to relocate out of the way. We don't have any wiring on ours in the way there. And then I'm going to continue cutting through the second layer here as well. Now that we've got it all cut out here, I'm just going to use a file, you can also use a razor knife, and go back and clean everything out. I just prefer the file over the razor knife because there's less potential to accidentally cut yourself. We're just looking to knock off the rough edges to give it a nice, smooth look.Next, we'll feed in our hardware. So we're going to take a fish wire, go from the front-most hole, feed it towards the back of the vehicle until we come out the larger hole here. Once we get there, we can take our spacer and our bolt, we're going to slide the spacer over the coil then first, then thread our bolt on. You can even take the spacer, if you want, and push it all the way up into the frame. I'm just going to get the bolt on first, push one piece up and put in the second piece, and we're just going to pull our fish wire back down. We're going to do the same thing with this hole on the other side and then we're going to come back to this hole here and we're going to do the reverse fish wire technique, where we take our bolt and our spacer and we place the spacer on the fish wire first, then put the bolts on it.We can then push the bolt up into the frame, followed by our spacer, and pull it back down. And again, we're going to do that on the other side as well. Now with an extra set of hands, we're going to lift our hitch into position, making sure to feed our fish wires down through the holes in our hitch. The fish wires are going to go in the forward most holes. You may need to pull down on the fascia a little bit to get the hitch to fall behind it. We'll then take our factory bolt that we had removed and we're going to thread that in. And then once you do that on each side, the hitch will hold itself up, making it easier to install the rest of your hardware. Now that we've got our hitch up here, you want to double check your cutting to make sure that it all fits okay.Make any adjustments if necessary and then if everything's good, you can clean up any markings that you've made. Now that we're satisfied with the cutout at the back, we can finish installing our hardware. We're going to remove our fish wires, place a conical tooth washer over the bolt with the teeth facing up towards the hitch, be careful not to push the bolt back up into the frame, and then thread a nut on the other side of the bolt. We're going to repeat that for the other bolt on this side and then the two bolts on the other side. We can then go back and tighten down our hardware. The nuts with the conical washers, we'll tighten with a 19 millimeter socket and the factory bolts, we're going to use a 21, just like we did to remove it. And then we can go back and torque the hardware to the specifications found in our instructions. We can now reinstall our heat shields. The holes that we cut out should fit right over the bolts.If they don't want to fit, you may need to make some small additional trims. And then we'll just re-install the hardware that we had removed. We can now reinstall our exhaust. A little bit of spray lubricant will make it easier to re-install it. Just give a little squirt there and lift them up and just slide the hangers back into the rubber isolators. And you also want to reinstall the bolts for the hangers towards the rear of the vehicle as well. We can now take our strap down and then re-install the under shield in reverse order of how we took it off. Now with everything re-installed, we're ready to hook up our trailer and hit the road. And that completes our installation of Draw-Tite's Class III 2" Trailer Hitch Receiver on our 2020 Ford Explorer.