Demco Classic Base Plate Kit - Fixed Arms

Video Transcript for Demco Classic Base Plate Kit Installation - 2013 Cadillac SRX

Hey guys, it's Jake here with etrailer. Today we have a 2013 Cadillac SRX and we're gonna be taking a look at and I'm gonna show you how to install the Demco base plate. Your base plate is going to be one of the main five components that you're going to need in order to flat tow your vehicle. So first off, obviously you'll have your base plate and you'll have your tow bar, your safety change, your diode wiring, and then a braking system. Now what this base plate's gonna allow you to do is it will allow you to flat tow your vehicle behind your motor home. The Demco base plates will fit directly into the Demco tow bars.

So if you have a Demco tow bar or you're looking for one, it'll also fit directly into the etrailer tow bars as long as you have the Demco ends on them. If you already have a tow bar you can pick up just an adapter to go in the end in order to fit into the Demco base plate. What I really like about this base plate is it's gonna come with pretty much everything you need, other than the wiring, obviously your tow bar and then your braking system. It'll have your safety chain loop tabs. I like 'em, 'cause they're very discreet, they're hidden in with the design of the base plate itself, you'll get a bracket to mount your sixfold to.

And we discovered that when installing this, the other side of the wiring bracket is great to be able to mount your breakaway switch too. Demco's base plate is going to have their really rugged textured black powder coat finish to be able to help with the rust and corrosion over the years. Now, if you see any rust and corrosion happen over time it's most likely going to happen on the inside of these two prongs where this is moving up and down or around where this safety chain is connected. You can't really get away from that. That's gonna happen on any base plate because you have metal on metal contact, paint really doesn't stand a chance.

All you have to do is give it a quick shot of spray paint and you're good to go for the next season. Now as far as the installation goes, this installation is not too bad, given that you do have to take the front face off. You will have to drill 14 holes in your frame of your vehicle. It's not too difficult. I would definitely say you could do this in maybe a weekend, give yourself two days and you should be able to do it no problem.

When it comes to trimming the front fascia you kind of have to get creative. The best way to do it, as you'll see later on in the video, you hold your fascia back up and kinda look at what needs to be trimmed. There will be instructions to show you what to trim. We don't really like to use those because it's a very generalized way of trimming. So what we do is we hold the fascia up and we see what's actually contacting the base plate and trim those portions out. But with that being said, let's go ahead and pull the car inside and show you how we did it. To begin our installation we're gonna have some push pin fasteners on top here that we're gonna need to remove 'cause we need to remove this black panel. We'll have six total, two on the top portion here and then 1, 2, 3 and 4. We'll use a trim panel removal tool. This one is specific for push pin fasteners. You can also use a flathead screwdriver. You just wanna pop these out, set 'em to the side, 'cause we will be putting them back. Now in order to get this removed, well what else we need to do is we need to take these, there's little tabs here, just slide it this way and then this little rubber strip will come right off. There you go. We'll just work our way around, and then this black plastic piece will just pop right off. Now with that rubber strip removed, you should be able to just pop this right off and set it to the side for reinstallation later on. Now with our cover out of the way, you'll expose seven 10 millimeter head bolts that are holding in the top of our grill here. We'll take 10 millimeter socket and get those removed. Inside our wheel wells we're gonna have four Phillips head screws that we're gonna need to remove. Your first one is gonna be right here. Then going down, you'll have another one, another one, and then this one down here. You will have two more further in, but we will not have to remove those to get this off. Start with this one here and we're using this angled drill bit holder. You can use a a ratchet with a drill bit in the end of it, however you see best to get these out. Now if you're doing this from the ground, what you can do is you can turn the wheel in on whichever side you're removing these screws on temporarily and then turn the wheel out the other way on the other side to get to those screws. That way you can still use a normal screwdriver. Now in behind our wheel well after we get these screws removed, you will pull the wheel well liner back and right here you'll have a seven millimeter head screw that you'll have to remove just like that. Now underneath our bumper we're gonna have 12 seven millimeter bolts. We're gonna have to remove you. Just want to be sure that you're not removing the air dam here. The bolts will be up in between each of these little cutouts and we'll start removing them. And what we'd like to do here, our next step is gonna be removing this fascia. What we like to do is take some blue painters tape and paint or tape the the joint here to be sure that when we go to pull the fascia off, what can happen is if you go to pull this off the fascia kind of wobbles wherever it wants to go and there's metal clips behind it that could scratch this paint. So we just put painter's tape on here to help it from getting scratched. Now we're ready to remove our fascia. What you wanna do is you want to get an extra set of hands to help you take the fascia off, because it's larger and awkward. So what you do is you just peel it off from the edges and then we'll have to watch because we have some fog lights in here we'll have to watch, be careful and look for any wires that are connected. And it looks like we've got the wiring harness on Brad's side over there and a sensor on this side. So we have one large connector over here that we're gonna disconnect, and then we'll also have these two wiper connections here. And basically all we did was we disconnected 'em and then stuck a bolt that we had lying around to plug it off, 'cause otherwise it'll want to keep draining. Set those off to the side and then we can set our fascia in a safe place. Now we're gonna have these two 10 millimeter bolts that we'll need to remove. And then with these tabs what we're gonna need to do is take these tabs and bend them at a 90 degree angle straight out this way. Take this, take a pair of pliers, being careful not to bend the bracket. We'll take these here, bend this tab down. Now to make room for our base plate, we need to trim the air dam and we just need to make essentially cut from here, go up, and then cut all of this off. This needs to come off but we wanna leave this portion that's up here and continues down. We wanna leave all that there. We're just using a multi-tool. You can use a pair of snips to be able to do this. Whatever you have, a razor blade might work too 'cause it is just rubber. And we're gonna repeat that same process on the other side. The next step in our process is gonna be lifting our base plate up into place. What we need to do is it's gonna have to rest right here on the side of our frame rail. So let's to pop this push pin fastener out and let this plug allow us to get it outta the way. Now we can lift our base plate up into place. You want to have yourself a couple of clamps ready to clamp this to the side of the frame. What you need is this racket needs to be below the base plate because eventually it will be attached to the bottom of it. Now we've got ours temporarily clamped to the pinch welds on our frame. What you want to do is you want the space from this cross tube to the bottom of this bumper to be 5/8 of an inch. So we've got this side lined up. What we'll need to do is loosen up our clamp here and lift it up just a little bit to get it closer to that 5/8 of an inch. There we go. Now clamp it back down. Now that we've got our base plate clamped up in place what we're gonna do is we need to draw out three holes here. We've got 1, 2, 1 of 'em is behind this, and then our third one's down here. We have to drill out these holes, slide our bolts through, get that bolted down first and then we can come back and drill out these four holes and throw in the self-tappers. Now in order to mark our center holes for this we're gonna use our final size, which is 13/32 drill bit. We'll use this our final size to mark the center. So you just drill a little bit and then you can see in the center of that hole is a little divot. We'll go back with a smaller pilot hole and work our way up to get to this final size. And with two of our holes drilled out we can take some clear coat. We're going to just line the bare metal that we just exposed by drilling that hole. Go ahead and put a little bit on the base plate too. This will just help to prevent rust and corrosion later on. And then what we need to do is once we get the hardware in these two holes, we'll tighten 'em down, and then take this clamp off and then reveal our third hole so that we can put the drill hole there too. We'll take one of our bolts that comes in our kit, a flat washer. You wanna put some blue loctite on all this hardware. Slide that in, followed by another flat washer on the backside, a lock washer, and a nut. I'll go ahead and tighten these down. We're not gonna really crank down on it because we will have to come back and torque 'em. We'll just give 'em a quick. Now with those two in place it's gonna hold our base plate still so we can pop our clamp off to see that third hole. We'll repeat that same process for this hole. Now we can take a 5/16 drill bit and drill out these four holes in our frame. Now we'll take the self-tappers that come in our kit and when you run these in you wanna run 'em in a little bit. You wanna really watch your socket, run it in a little bit, pack it out, run it in, pack it out, and then drive it home. Now once you get it to go all the way through like that, we'll take some blue loctite, some on the threads, and then put it back in. I will do that same process to the remaining three. Now we'll repeat that same process on the driver's side of the vehicle and then we'll come back, and we need to torque down all the hardware to the specifications and the instructions. The next thing we had to do is we took some of the shorter bolts that came in our kit and this is what bending those brackets at a 90 degree we're for. What's nice is Demco, on their base plate, they give you a place to bolt this to, so that this cooler can operate as it's supposed to. Now this time you would reinstall the fascia on the front of your car. We are going to be installing some more flat tow components, so if you have some more this is a great time to do it. We have several different things that we need to install such as diode wiring, your braking system, stuff like that. That is a lot easier to get installed when running all the wiring and stuff without the front fascia in place. It helps you to just organize the wires a lot better get 'em outta the way and then after we get all that done, we can come back, put the front fascia back on and cut out what we need to, 'cause we will have to do a little bit of trimming to get the front of our base plate to be able to fit through the front grill. Well guys, hopefully this video helped you decide whether or not the Demco base plate is right for you and your 2013 Cadillac SRX.