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This fully welded trailer hitch receiver bolts onto your vehicle's frame with no welding required. Matte black, powder coated steel is durable and corrosion resistant and creates a rugged look.
Features:
Specs:
The sturdy steel construction is protected with a matte black finish for added durability. This unique powder coating gives etrailer hitches a carbide-like appearance and a rugged look that sets them apart from traditional glossy hitches. In addition to being rust and corrosion resistant, the tough matte coating hides dirt, scuffs, and dings better than a glossy finish.
At etrailer we're committed to the products we sell, and to our customers. Our experienced and knowledgeable staff are available via both phone and email to address your questions and concerns for the lifetime of your hitch. The technicians at etrailer perform hitch installations on a daily basis, making them a valuable resource for do-it-yourselfers. The one-on-one, personal service you'll receive comes straight from an expert in the towing and automotive field. We've installed it, we've wired it and we've towed with it, so whatever your question, we can answer it.
Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Hey guys, it's take here with etrailer. Today we have a 2015 Chevrolet City Express and we're gonna be taking a look at and I'm gonna show you how to install the etrailer class three two-inch hitch receiver. Adding the hitch receiver to your City Express is gonna give you a lot of options. It's gonna allow you to carry bike racks, cargo carriers, and maybe even tow a small trailer. This hitch is gonna be rated for 525 pounds of tongue weight and 3,500 pounds of max gross trailer weight if you plan on towing a trailer. You do wanna be sure to check in your owner's manual to see what your submodel is able to tow.
This hitch is gonna feature a matte black powder coat finish that's gonna help to resist rust and corrosion. It'll feature some safety chain loops. They are a little bit smaller from what we're used to seeing here, but they still are gonna fit your standard S hooks and your many, many other style hooks. The hitch will also have a 5/8 inch hitch pin hole. This hitch does not come with a pin and clip, but it will fit your standard 5/8 inch hitch pin.
So if you have one already, you can use that or many of our accessories will come with one. You'll notice the hitch does stick out past our bumper a little bit. It really is just the collar so it's not far enough to be able to hit your shin on it or your leg if you're working out of the back of your van. A lot of people will use these for work so that is a nice feature. If you have a ball mountain in there you will wanna be careful though 'cause that will stick out quite a bit further.
From the center of our hitch pin hole to the outermost part of our bumper is gonna be about an inch and a half, so keep that in mind if you're looking for any accessories like a bike rack or a cargo carrier. With this hitch, typically, if they're past the bumper you should have no problems with any of those bike racks or cargo carriers. Folding up to the back of your car. From the ground to the top inside of the receiver tube is gonna be about 12 inches. That's about the height that we recommend looking for accessories with a rise in the shank.
This particular owner of this one is going to use it to tow a small trailer for its irrigation business. So it's gonna work out great for him. Now as far as the installation goes it's not too bad of an installation. You should be able to get it done in a couple of hours. Really all it involves is trimming a couple of tabs on the bumper itself and lowering the spare tire and lowering the exhaust. There are gonna be two ways to run the hardware through the frame. One way is going to involve drilling out a hole to about 7/8 of an inch and another way is going to be running it a little bit further to a larger access hole in the back of the frame. So it may take you longer to run the hardware, but it's also gonna take you a little bit to draw out those holes. With that being said, let's go ahead and take it inside and show you how we did it. To begin our installation, we need to start by removing our spare tire. We will be reinstalling it, it's just gonna give us more room to be able to get the hitch up into place. You'll have a 7/8 inch bolt on the backside right near your door latch and this is going to lower down a hook so we can remove it off this cage holding the spare tire on. (tools rattling) Lift it up, lower it down, and grab our spare tire, pull it out of the way. Next we're gonna be lowering our exhaust to make more room to get our hitch in place. We'll take a cam-buckle strap and if you only have a ratchet strap you can use that too. Just don't crank down on it too hard. We just hook it from one hole to another just to provide support when we use a crowbar to pop this exhaust hanger off We typically use a little bit of soapy water and that helps it to come off real easy. Once that's off, we can loosen the cam-buckle strap and pull our exhaust down a little bit. Now we need to take a flathead screwdriver and remove two push pin fasteners from underneath. They're holding these little tabs on. We remove the driver's side already, but for the passenger side you take a flathead screwdriver or a trim panel tool if you have one. Push it under the middle portion of it. These are a little stuck. Here we go. Pry it out. And then you wanna pry out the base. Set these aside. We're gonna take this tab and fold it down so that we can have a better look at it. In your instructions it's gonna mark out. It is a really small picture, but this is what it's trying to show. We'll mark this up to the crease line and then go straight across because our access hole for a bolt is going to be underneath here and we're gonna need to use that in order to attach our hitch. So we'll take some snips, we're just using a pair of tin snips here and we'll cut this plastic up to the seam and then cut the seam across. So we just noticed we raised our hitch up in place just temporarily, we notice that this bracket is not mentioned in the instructions, but we will have to remove it. It is just a wiring support bracket it looks like. So we'll take this off. We'll also underneath that bracket we just took off we'll have a bolt head that we'll have to cut off. (tools buzzing) Next we're going to be fish wiring our hardware through our frame. Now the three holes on each side that you're gonna be using for your hardware are gonna be this hole here, which is gonna be underneath this plastic tab that we just pulled down. This hole here and this hole. Now there's two different ways you can run your hardware. One way is that you can widen this hole to 7/8 of an inch and run your hardware up inside these two holes down and out. Or you can take your fish wires and run them from this hole over top of this shackle. For your leaf spring you have to go over top because underneath it's too small for the head of the carriage bolt to fit. We're gonna do this method 'cause we already did the passenger side and it worked out great. So we'll start with our fish wire. I like to put a little bit of a bend in it and then we'll start with our furthermost bolt and you're usually pretty safe if you follow the top of the frame and push it over top of our shackle mount. There we go. You can also use a magnet if you have one long enough to fit back in there. Hold on to these two ends. I typically will put a bend in it like this so that it can't go back up inside the hole. And we'll take a spacer block, slide it on, and then thread on our carriage bolt. I'll take this, push the carriage bolt up through the hole first (metal clunking) and you'll wanna pull and wiggle the hardware until it comes out of the hole. We'll do that same thing for this hole. Run it up and over and then this hole is gonna be fairly easy 'cause we just have to go from here to here. (metal clunking) There we go. Now we're ready to raise our hitch up in the position. Now with an extra set of hands we can get our hitch in place. The fish wire is gonna help us to get our bolts aligned. That's why we like to leave them on. We can take this, slide our fish wire in, and we'll have to slide it over the top of our driver's side frame rail or our springs first and then come back (hardware rattling) over our passenger side. So we'll raise it up, make sure our bolts come down through. We do have a wire that's gonna interfere here. So we'll take a trim panel tool, move it out of the way, and this is gonna allow us to get that bolt running. Pull that fish wire off and then turn on one of our flange nut. Now we're having a little bit of interference with some sealant up here, but what we're gonna do is we're going to use a 19 millimeter socket, draw the hitch up a little bit so that we can get our hardware on our bolts. (tools rattling) With all our flange nuts in place, we can tighten them all down and come back with a torque wrench and torque it to the specifications in the instructions. So after torquing everything down we went to put the plastic support brackets back up and we tried trimming a little bit more, but with this hitch it's just not gonna line up right. So we're going to trim the rest of this tab off, but then on the passenger side we ended up having to trim a little bit of this right here in order to fit it with the hitch. So we popped that back up in place and we're all good to go. Now we're ready to put our exhaust back on, put our spare tire back in the cage, and raise it back up and we're ready to use our hitch. Well, guys, hopefully this video helped you decide whether or not the etrailer class three two-inch hitch receiver is right for your 2015 Chevrolet City Express.
Average Customer Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (8 Customer Reviews)
This fully welded trailer hitch receiver bolts onto your vehicle's frame with no welding required. Matte black, powder coated steel is durable and corrosion resistant and creates a rugged look.Yes, you guys rock.! You did what you said you were going to do.. the instructions are clear, and especially like the fact there is an actual phone number to call if you need too. Very satisfied!
Quality product and the best price after shopping a significant amount. Additionally, the video was extremely beneficial! Very PLEASED!
Thank you love the product free shipping fast shipping
Didn't fit between frame as easily as you made it look in video!
Excellent fix
i love it. clean and precise. its built better than my frame.
The hitch showed up in a timely manner and I installed it immediately based on the video.
In the video, the fishing of the bolts\washers was glossed over. I ended up using a 12 gauge wire to fish around to the openings where I would tape the supplied fish wire. Also, you have to go OVER the hub for the suspension. If your wire goes under, when you fish, the bolt head won't fit. Once the bolts were all fished through, installation went easier than I would have expected.
The instructions was hard to understand, and the middle bolt was was the hardest to install because there was no explanation of how to pull the bolt guide through the frame, instead of a 1hr job took me 3-4hr but I finally figure how it works and the hitch was a super tight fit I had to use my jack to push it up to make it fit in so I can tighten it up,
This was a relatively straightforward install on my 2021 NV200 aside from the fact that I first tried option 1 (as described in the instructions) for fishing bolts from the back and just could not get the bolt and spacer past the suspension shackle. The guy in the video made it look easy but he’s probably done it a hundred times and has the right touch. No matter how many times I tried, over a period of about an hour, the bolt and spacer just got stuck on the suspension shackle (I was lured into a sense of confidence after watching the video and with the knowledge that I am pretty good at fishing wires; the skill did not readily transfer). Then it took me another hour to get the bolt back out again to try option 2. With a titanium unibit, enlarging the secondary frame access hole and fishing from the front was way easier (I just had a standard drill; a right angle drill would have made it easier to work in that tight space). I thought I would save time with option 1 and not having to enlarge the secondary access hole but in retrospect the whole process would have been much simpler if I had begun with option 2. With this one exception, the how to video and the instructions are excellent and I was able to tackle the project with confidence despite never having installed a hitch before. I loved the fish wires that came as part of the kit that were designed to thread onto the bolts (very clever). I of course removed the spare tire before I started to have space to work under the van and get the hitch into position, but could not get the exhaust detached from the rubber isolator. I just gave up on that as there was enough play in the system to get the hitch up and over the exhaust system without fully detaching. I had to remove a small bracket used to hold wiring on the right and cut away some of the trim to expose a rear mounting hole. One other detail I had to address was my van has an aftermarket rear seat installed and the anchor bracket for that interfered slightly with the positioning for the hitch. I used a grinder to cut a small notch in the hitch so it would fit around this bracket.
Pretty easy and straightforward install. I handled it alone in my carport, and it took about 3 hours, total. I didn't need to elevate the van at all, and I used basic tools, the scissor jack that came with the van as an extra hand at the end, and a dremel to enlarge the frame holes to fish the bolts through using method #2, as the process shown in the video was not possible on my '15 Chevy City Express. Enlarging the forward frame holes to fish the bolts through was the toughest part, but wasn't overly difficult, and I sprayed the holes with a little rustoleum paint I already had when I was finished to prevent rust. (Keep that in mind if you don't have any on hand.) I needed to remove one small bracket holding some wires from the frame on the passenger side, and just zip-tied the wire to the hitch in the same spot when I was done. The same wire also needed to be slightly relocated just below the rear bumper to allow the hitch to fit into place. Those two steps were not in the directions, but were obvious and very simple to take care of with 2 zip-ties. Overall, the fit of the hitch was really good, and so far it seems like a high quality piece. The paint looks good, it doesn't protrude from the rear bumper, and it is very sturdy but not excessively heavy. I am happy with the purchase and install. If you're handy and have tools don't waste your money paying a shop to put it on for you, and you don't need a lift, ramps, or jack stands.
Hitch fit my Nissan NV 200 exactly. No cutting or drilling was required to attach hitch. Ingenious method to get the mounting bolts to proper location!
I would surely recommend etrailer to anyone looking to buy a trailer hitch.
Nissan nv200 curt hitch. A great product, but a bit misleading on the ease of mounting. Bolts are 2 big to fish around leaf spring mount. And no demo on the difficulty enlarging hole to access mt. Points.
I was amazed at how well the hitch fit. However I don't see any way to get the bolt and plate over or under the spring shackle (option #1)
This the the 4th hitch I have ordered for a vehicle from etrailer. Service is always fast. Parts are accurate. Installation has never been difficult.
If I ever need another hitch, I'll be back.
Fits perfect , only only thing I would highly stress about installation and do believe should be added to footnotes is when you feed the wire thru frame to drag bolt thru make sure the wire is on top of the shackle bolt inside the frame .
I learned the hard way . Fed wire thru , then attached bolt and washer and went to pull thru and it got wedged under the lower bolt shackle inside frame and was stuck . Had to drill a hole inside van right above the area to retrieve bolt .
Really need to add to instructions . After I figured that out rest were fairly easy . But big set back back for one bolt .
Well designed product.
Items to note;
The facia needs trimming but not how the instruction say.
Mine has the bumper proximity sensors which required loosening the wires and cutting a mounting stud.
The instructions show the four frame mounting bolts being feed through the frame with the 1x3" spacers kinked on the wire. This should me more obvious...
Good heavy hitch, it looked flimsy in the picture.
Don't install this hitch if you're not comfortable with a 1" hole saw (not 7/8" like the instructions say). Wear eye protection. The metal pieces go everywhere!
Don't even try to fish the bolt thru the rear access hole- just do the optional bolt installation. (Enlarge the forward frame access hole to 1" just in front of the hitch bolt holes.)
Have some help and put vehicle on a lift if possible.
Mark and trim the plastic part by holding the hitch up to the bumper and mark what needs to be trimmed before you take the trim fasteners out.
The hitch is solid and is well hidden under the bumper but it has started to rust a little from paint scratches at the receiver. Overall installation was challenging (the hitch had warped during shipoing( but strainer customer service was very helpful.
Is instaled already in the van, look good and I believe will be right for what I need, pull a trailer with 2 motorcycles and my other trailer with my jet ski if I need,but the main purpose is to hold a basket in the hitch to carry 4 or 5 cans with fuel and a small generator in long trips, installation was not difficult when my son and I found the way, fit perfect, look strong and I’m satisfied with my purchase.
The hitch is awesome, I had trouble getting the bolt plates thru the side rails in the frame. after a few hours fighting it, I just drilled a hole thru the floor will use the metal that came out with hole saw to plug the holes. the back to bolts were ok to put in. all in all, for a guy that has not put a hitch on in over 20 years, it took me about 4 hours with my Neighbors help.
I am very happy with the simple installation of this trailer hitch. It installed pretty much as shown on the [installation] video. My only problem is that I may have ordered the wrong hitch for my year van. The frame Chanel was almost completely boxed in at the end with only about a 1 1/2” square hole to fish the bolt and plate thru. With a few adjustments I managed. Very happy with the product though.
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