Roadmaster Crossbar-Style Base Plate Kit - Removable Arms

Video Transcript for Roadmaster Crossbar-Style Base Plate Kit Installation - 2019 Ram 1500

Hi there, Ram owners. Today, on your 2019 Ram 1500, we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install Roadmaster's crossbar-style base plate. And this is what our base plate looks like when it's installed. It is two separate pieces that will pass through your bumper where the safety hooks used to be on your truck. If you don't have safety hooks on your truck, it'll still go in the same location and poke out in that area. This is your traditional Roadmaster-style base plate, so it has the round pegs that can insert and click into place when you're ready to attach your tow bar.

But we've got it in the mode here where if you're just gonna be driving it around town, we've got those arms removed to minimize the distance that sticks out here at the front. Just to be outside of that, we've got our safety cable attachment point for hooking up our safety cables when we hook up to the motorhome. And on the driver's side here, Roadmaster provided two pegs that gives you a location to mount your wiring for your electrical connector. We also utilize this same mounting location here for our breakaway switch, and for the connection point for our supplemental braking system, we're using the Air Force One. In most flat tow applications, you have a breakaway switch in this connector, this here is just exclusive to that particular breaking system we're using.

Now, when you're ready to attach your arms, they simply slide into place, and you just give it a little twist until it clicks in. And at that point, we've now got our attachment for our crossbar. If you're using a Roadmaster-style crossbar, when you have attached to both arms here, the crossbar is removable. But if you're using another manufacturer's crossbar, you may or may not be able to remove it. We're gonna be installing one from etrailer here onto our base plate.

And with that one, you're not gonna be able to remove these arms. Once it's installed, the only way to remove it at that point would be to take the bolts out. So, I highly recommend sticking with all Roadmaster products rather than mixing and matching. And here, you can get a better look at it with both of our arms inserted here. The entire base plate is gonna have a black powder coat finish on to protect it from rust and corrosion.

And this is a pretty easy base plate to install. It does get more complicated if you have a diesel, turbo-diesel model, there's gonna be a few extra things you're gonna have to remove. This one here is not a turbo-diesel, it's just a regular gas engine. And with those, there's actually a lot of steps that we don't have to perform, 'cause the intercooler and stuff that's on the diesel is not gonna be here on the regular gas engine. So, if you have a regular gas engine, I would say that this is something that you could probably install in your garage. It's actually really easy, so I'd say, probably about three to four hours. And that's pretty good for getting the base plate installed 'cause we don't have to take the whole fascia off. Now, if you do have the diesel engine, you've got a little bit more trimming and a little more components you'll need to remove. I would say, probably add on maybe an hour to an hour and a half of extra time for those models. So, now that we've covered some of the features of our base plate, why don't you follow along with us and we'll show you how to get it installed. We'll begin our installation underneath the vehicle. We'll need to remove our tow hooks if they're in place, or if you don't have tow hooks like us, we'll just need to get this cover out of the way. And here, we're looking at the backside of our plastic cover here where our tow hook would be. This would be one of the bolts that connects to your tow hook, going straight up here. We are gonna have to still remove this even though we don't have a tow hook, but this is the cover that we're talking about that we need to get out of the way. There's two nuts on top. One here and one over there. We're gonna remove these nuts with an eight-millimeter socket or a wrench, whatever you've got that you can fit up in here. And a lot of times, after you get these kinda started, you can take them out by hand from there. So, we'll just remove these nuts from that one. We'll remove it from the other side there over here. Okay. After you remove the nuts, the studs there will actually come out from the place that they're located here. So, we're just gonna kinda twist them and pull them towards the rear. The other one actually came out of there when I took the nut off, right here. Sometimes, they can be a little finicky, though, getting them out of there, sometimes you got to pry a little bit from behind. There we go, we just use our screwdriver to give a little bit of a bump from behind to take that out of there. Now, we can take the whole panel out. It does still have a couple of clips here on the bottom if you look, they're just like little metal speed clips. Those really aren't that important. You can use your screwdriver if you think you need to. But in a lot of cases, when we just pull our, push this out of here, it does just pull off. We're gonna try to save as much of the plastic as possible, though, so we're gonna use the screwdriver there. Just pop those little rings off of there, and then this whole piece should come out of here now. Now that we get those removed, we're gonna come back around to the outside and take our trim panel tool here. We're gonna kinda pull down just a little bit on this and stick it in here, and that's gonna release the clips. We can then just kinda pull the top out and then pull it up like this to get those two bottom ones come out of there. So, you do have two options, you could just leave this out completely, or you could trim it out and reinstall it. And we're gonna do that 'cause the outer ring here is gonna look a lot nicer being in place. But all of this area here in the middle of the flat back, we're gonna get rid of them. We're gonna try to trim along the inside edge of this here. So, I'm gonna take a drill to start, and we're just gonna drill a hole to get a pass-through here. We're gonna put a couple of them in there. Usually, I try to do kinda like in the corners. All right, so now that we've got some access holes drilled into there, we can take a small reciprocating blade and cut this out. You could also use a cut-off wheel. Probably, the backside's the easier way to do that with a cut-off wheel. But you can't really see what you're doing while you're cutting if you're cutting from the backside, so I like this method better than with a cut-off wheel. And now, we're just gonna trim this out. And a couple of spots, looks like we might need to clean up a little bit there just to get through. There we go. And then we can take a file now and just go along the inside edge here and clean up any rough edges, like these little straggly things we've got left behind, we can knock that off to make it all smooth. We can now reinsert the piece that we had removed. It just pops back into place. Double-check on the inside to make sure that your tabs lined up with the holes. And it looks like we had one that we missed here. So, if you have one that misses, you can just pull it back out and just start again. It might help to maybe look on the backside there to get those started. And then the rest just pops into place. And then we're gonna reinstall the same fasteners that we had removed to get it out of there the first time. For these lower ones, when you go to push them on, it's a lot easier if you do it with it in certain direction. So, you can see, it's kinda beveled on it there. We want the smoother side to be the top, and the jaggedy teeth side to be the bottom. There we go. And then for your other fasteners, these will just slide right back into place in the little slots. And you'll secure it with a nut on top. And now that we've got that reinstalled, we're gonna come back to the backside here, we're gonna remove this bolt here. We'll use an 18-millimeter socket to do so. And now, it's not uncommon for moisture to build up inside of there and be quite rusted and corroded and making it difficult to remove the bolt. Once you have it zipped out and it seems like it's loose but it won't come all the way out there, you just gonna have drive it out the rest of the way due to the corrosion that's occurred. So, I'd like to use a wrench to set it on there, it just gives you a little bit larger area of a strike on with your hand. And there we go. So actually, we got that out of there. We can see, there was some rust and corrosion on it, but that wasn't what was holding it up in there. This is just a little speed nut. They put these on there during assembly, it kinda holds the bolt up in there, it just makes assembly easier, it's not necessary at all, it's really just for, when the vehicle's being assembled. So, we're just gonna grab it with a pair of pliers here and just thread it right off there. You could also cut it off of there. If you're having a real hard time, you can take like a pair of side cutters and just kinda snip it off of there. But a lot of times, you can just hold it and thread it out like that. If we followed the bolt that we just removed, go straight forward and then to be outside a little bit, you'll see, there's a nut here, we're gonna remove that from this bolt. And we can just set that aside. And then we're gonna head over across from there. You'll see, there's this vertical bracket here, we wanna remove the lower bolt down there. And you'll use a 13-millimeter socket for this one. After we get that bolt removed, we're now gonna trim off all of this excess here. And we're gonna just basically trim it flush with the bottom of this beam here going across. We don't need this section here anymore. It's in the way of our base plate. All right, next, we're gonna be cutting this off. Now, a reciprocating blade can work, but you are kinda limited by your space. And there's quite a bit of movement out of the bumper here and it wants to kinda flex a lot, so I found that a cut-off wheel is probably gonna be a little bit easier. So, we're just gonna get in here and just zip this off right across the bottom. All right, now that we've got that cut off of there, we can take our trim panel tool here and just pop our wire right off of there. We'll just get behind that, and you can just give that kind of a twist and that'll pop right out of there. And then we'll head down the wire here towards the front and the bottom, we're gonna unclip it from here as well. Try and get underneath of it there. There you go. And that way, we can push that out of the way for our base plate installation. We can now take our base plate and put it into position. We're starting here on the driver's side, so this is the one that has the two little bars out of here for your electrical mounting. We're gonna come in from the back side here. Slide it up through our hole. We wanna make sure that that outer hole on our base plate slides over the stud there. We'll then take nut and just loosely install it to keep that kinda where we need it. We can also take the long body bolt that ran up through the bottom, push it back up and get it loosely installed as well. We don't want anything to be real tight just yet, just kinda hand tight, just to hold it into their rough position we want it in, but we are gonna need to be able to move it back and forth a little bit, just to make sure everything lines up the way it needs to. We can now take the largest bolt that comes in our kit. This is the thickest diameter. We're gonna place a lock washer on it. We're gonna put some red Loctite on it. And all the bolts that come in our kit here, the ones that we're gonna be using to attach the base plate, we're gonna put that red Loctite on. I'm gonna probably take this nut that we had here. It's just loose for now, so we're gonna probably back that off and put a little bit of Loctite on there as well. This is gonna slide up through this hole in the bottom of your base plate here, just forward of the body mount bolt. There's a space there, though, that needs to go between the frame and your base plate. So, we're just gonna take this around the side there, and we're just sliding it in between the two, lining it up with the hole, and then we can go up through the base plate and the spacer and thread into the weld nut into the bottom, located into the bottom of the frame. And again, it's just gonna be hand tight. That's good enough for now. So, that sets us up for the next two fasteners. These are gonna be the slightly smaller diameter ones that come in your kit. These ones, of course, we're gonna get the Loctite as well. We're gonna start with a large flat washer on it. You do get large and small ones. Here's the small one for comparison. Large one first. We're then gonna come from the front of the bumper beam, there's a hole in the bumper beam there, and that'll line up with the hole in your base plate there, so that'll just poke right on through. On the other side, we're gonna follow this up with the smaller flat washer, a lock washer, and a nut. And there's another hole, just about maybe two or three inches, about three inches down from the one that we just put in. We're gonna use the exact same hardware combination through that hole. Finding where you're arm can fit in there can be the trickiest part. And following all that up with the exact same hardware as that top bolt. These are also just hand tight for now. We can then head back straight down to the bolt we've removed here, where we cut off that bracket, we're gonna put a little bit of Loctite on that factory bolt and reinsert that one into there as well. At this point now, we've got all of our hardware loosely installed, so we can go back and start tightening everything down. We'll then switch from our 18-millimeter socket over to a 22-millimeter socket, and that's gonna be for the other bolt that's going straight up here that we installed. All right, and then we can switch to 19-millimeter socket and wrench for the upper two bolts that we had installed. And you are gonna probably need a wrench to hold the other side. And now, we can tighten down that last little 13-millimeter bolt down here. And now, we can go back and torque our hardware to the specifications outlined in our instructions. And now, the wiring that we had moved out of the way here, we're just gonna use some zip ties to zip tie it up behind the paneling here to keep it out of the way. And now, with all of our hardware torqued down, the base plate for our driver's side here is fully installed, we'll perform the exact same procedures over on the other side to get that one installed. And that completes our installation of Roadmaster's crossbar-style base plate on our 2019 Ram 1500..