Reese Quick-Install Custom Installation Kit w/ Base Rails for 5th Wheel Trailer Hitches

Video Transcript for Reese Quick Install 5th Wheel Base Rail Kit Installation - 2020 Ram 2500

Ryan: Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today, on our 2020 Ram 2500, we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Reese quick-install custom installation kit with base rails for a fifth wheel trailer hitch. So to me, probably my favorite thing about this kit is the fact that it is custom fit and design for the Ram 2,500. Honestly, whenever I was pulling a heavy trailer, that really gave me a peace of mind knowing that this is set up to specifically work with this truck. A lot of our customers have actually said one thing they're really impressed with is how well built this kit is, and to be honest with you, I'd have to agree with them. Everything's really thick and heavy duty.

It should last just as long as your truck.Now, since these rails do sit inside of the bed, they are going to take up a little bit of space, but not too much because they do have a relatively low profile. So I really don't see them getting in the way that often whenever you go to put your things in and out of the bed of your truck. So these rails are going to have multiple different slots here to work with different types of fifth wheel head configurations, and so these should pretty much work with just about any common fifth wheel head out there.Now, some questions we get in regards to these fifth wheel kits and is how much space are you going to have in the front here Some people like to have their tool box or another type of accessory, and that's definitely understandable. Today on our Ram, we have the short bed, and just to give you an idea, if you go from the bed to the very back edge of our rail here, looks like it's going to sit right about 21 and three quarters of an inch. But at the end of the day, a kit you really can't go wrong with, it's going to be really well built, last a long time, and worked with a lot of different types of those fifth wheel heads.

So it definitely has some versatility.Now, as far as the installation goes, it's really not too bad. I will say the most difficult part is getting to some of the bolts underneath the truck. Can be a little tight at times, but as long as you stay focused, shouldn't have an issue getting it installed. But speaking of that, let's go ahead and put it all together now.To begin our install, we're going to be underneath the bottom of our truck. First thing you're going to want to do is temporarily remove your spare tire, it's going to give us a lot more room to work, and then we can focus on this little heat shield right here.

To get this off, there's going to be a total of six 10 millimeter bolts. Two of them, I already went ahead and took out, because it's a little tricky to see. Those are going to be right here and here, attaching to this brace here. The other four are going to be here, here, here, and here. Once we have it removed, we can just set it off to the side.Now what we can do is lower our exhaust some, and that'll give us some more space to get all of her parts on.

So what you're going to do is come here to this rubber hanger. You can spray it down with some soapy water or some type of lubricant and get a pry bar. What you're going to do is just pry that rubber portion off of our exhaust. With it off like this, it should give us a little wiggle room here if we need it. On the driver's side of our frame rail, if you look, we're going to have our brake lines that run right here and some wiring. What we're going to do is separate them from the frame. So you can take a trim tool like this or a flathead screwdriver and try to just pry underneath the little connector there and just pop those off.Now we can hop up into the bed of our truck and figure out the placement for our rear rail here. So there's a few things to pay attention to whenever you're doing this. You're going to measure the distance from the edge of the bed itself. You don't want to measure from the tailgate, so this edge right here, and pay attention too, because the distance is different if you have a short or long bed. Find that measurement in instructions. And I like to do is measure from there, maybe mark a couple of two or three spots, and then we need to make sure that the rail is centered in the bed. So to find that, what I like to do is measure either from this line here in the bed or even the wheel well. So you'll go from here to here. Try to remember that distance, same on this side, and you want to center it. So you want this distance to be the same over here as it is here.Once you have that laid out, though, what I like to do is just maybe take a pen or pencil and just lightly trace around this, so that way we don't lose its placement. Now what we can do is get ready to pre-drill where our attachment points are going to be on the rail. So we're going to be using this hole here, this one here, this one right here in the center, and same on the other side, so this one right here and this one right here. So what I'm going to do is take a center punch, and you want to line it up as best you can in the dead center, that opening there, or just put an indention in it. That way we will hold those spots so we can pre-drill them out. Now I'm going to do this for all of these attachment points here. Now what I'm going to do is take a small drill bit and make some pilot holes. When you're drilling through this, not a bad idea just to double check underneath to make sure you're not going to accidentally drill into something of importance.Now we can move over to our wheel wells, and we're going to loosely install our side brackets. So these are side specific, so pay attention. Make sure you have the correct one. Quick way you can identify that is this angled edge here. The angle is going to face towards the front of the truck. So we are on the passenger side, just to give you an idea. So what this is going to do, these two holes here are going to line up with these two threaded holes here in the frame rail, and once we get this loosely on, you want to make sure that this hole here at the top lines up with the corresponding pilot hole that we drilled in our bed.Since these are threaded, not a bad idea to take a tube brush or something, clean out any debris that might be in there. Our truck does have a lot of undercoating on it, so that's something to pay attention to as well. What we're going to do is take these bolts and a conical tooth washer, make sure that the teeth on the washer are going to face our bracket like this. Then we're simply just going to line these up and get them started. With this undercoating, I like to really make sure they're going in straight by hand, because sometimes that undercoating cam throw the bolt off a little bit. You definitely don't want to cross thread it or anything like that. So once I know they're going, I'll just snug them down, but I won't tighten them down so tight that you can't actually move this bracket. You still want just a little bit of wiggle in it there.Over here on the driver's side, I went ahead and repeated that same process. Now, we can hop back up in our bed and I just moved our rail out of the way, and we can enlarge all of our holes to the amount specified in the instructions. So the two holes here in our bed that are closest to the front of our truck, once you punch through the bed, it actually goes down a little bit and hits the corrugation on the underside of her bed, and so I'm going to use a longer drill bit to drill through that corrugation as well. I'm going to do that for each one here closest towards the front of the trunk. So those same two holes closest to the front of our truck, or we're going to need to do is open just this first layer of metal up to a larger size. It's listed in the instructions. By opening that hole up larger, that's going to allow us to put in a spacer. I'm going to use a stepper bit to enlarge this open.So now that we have both of those holes enlarged, I'm just going to grab my vacuum and suck up all the shavings just to clean up our mess a little bit. It's not a bad idea, too, to either grab some spray paint or paint stick like this and just go around the holes that we drilled just to put a layer over that bare exposed metal. So now if we move to those larger holes that we made, we're going to grab these tube spacers, and these are just going to simply just sit down in there just like that. We can grab our rail and just slide that back into position, lining everything up.For these holes back here, we're going to take the long carriage bolts and just set them down in there. Same thing over here. This can be a little tricky trying to go all the way down through there, especially trying to get that spacer lined up a little bit. Probably just keep it in place like this for now. Once we get all the hardware loosely installed, we'll be able to kind of work that down in there. Now for the holes here towards the very back, we're going to take a U shaped spacer block, slide that under, take one of our shorter carriage bolts, drop that through. Same thing here in the center and here on the far end.So now underneath the truck, we can get our hardware in place that's going to secure to all the bolts that we dropped through. So we're going to start with the hardware that's closest to the front of our truck, and here's one of the bolts here. On these, we're going to take a conical tooth washer, make sure the teeth face up towards the bed. We're going to take a hex nut, and we're just going to get that hand tight for now. Now I did the same thing over here on the other side. It is a little bit trickier though, because this frame bracket don't give us a ton of space, so it does help to have an extra set of hands that can be up top of the bed, turning our bolt while you're below it holding on to the conical tooth washer and the nut.So now we can move on to this bolt here in the very center of our bed. What we're going to do is take a U shaped spacer block, conical tooth washer, and a hex nut. We'll get this hand tight as well. For the bolts that dropped down through our side plates here, what you're going to do is take the washer, the rectangle shape washer like this, or a spacer block rather. What I'd actually done is just taped a conical tooth washer to it just to make it one unit. Slide over our bolt, make sure that that tape isn't getting away, if you did do that. So once our bolt has passed through there, you can then take a hex nut and get it started hand tight, and we'll do the same thing on the other side.Now back up in the bed of the truck, what you're going to do is take the other rail and just set it here in the front. You're going to take your fifth wheel, put it into the openings here on that back rail, and the fifth wheel is actually going to more or less determine the location of our front mounting rail here. So I took a fifth wheel, connected it into the openings here in our front rail. What I'm going to do now is make sure that it is centered and square, and from there we can mark all of our attachment points. So I'll just do like you did the other one and make sure that distance is the same on each side.So now that we've verified our rail is centered and correct, I'm going ahead and use the punch and a hammer again to mark our attachment points. The attachment points we're going to be using is this one and this one. We're going to be using this one here in the center, and on the other side, this one here as well as this one. Now that we have them punched and marked, go ahead and take our fifth wheel out of the truck, move it out of the way as well as our rail, and get our holes drilled.So I went ahead and got all of our holes drilled out to the size in our instructions, vacuumed up our mess, and then covered up that bare metal with some paint, just like we did the other one. But then now we can slide our rail into position here on the end. So we're just going to take our carriage bolts, just drop them down. For the one in the center, we're going to to use a U shaped spacer block just like we did the other rail. Just slide that underneath it, take our carriage bolt, drop it down, and then we'll just have our carriage bolts again on these ends. So what I went and did is take our fifth wheel and set it back on the rails, and what this is going to do is just help keep everything true and where we want it while we're underneath the truck, finishing up, putting on the rest of our hardware.Underneath the truck where our hardware drops down on the sides, we can get our frame plates on. We're on the passenger side right now. We do have a wire that runs up along our frame around here, so I'm just going to use my trim tool and going pry that off so we have a little more room. But with that being said, we can take our bracket, and again, these are side specific, so be sure you have the correct side. Slide it in place. Be sure not to pinch a wire, this wire if you have it there. But these holes in the bracket are going to line up with holes in the frame. We're going to put bolts in there.So before we do that, we're going to take a U shaped spacer block, put it in between this bracket and the bottom of our bed, and then on each side, you're going to push your bracket against our frame there. Line up the hole in the bracket with the hole in the frame. Get a bolt, conical tooth washer, and get them started hand tight. If you're having trouble getting it lined up, sometimes what you can do is take a screwdriver or something and use that to help pry that into position. With our bracket in place, this bolt here, close to the front of the truck, we're going to take a conical tooth washer and a hex nut back on hand tight. We're going to use a little bit different combination for the bolt back here. We're going to take, again, one of these spacer blocks. I taped that conical tooth washer to it. We're going to slide that over the bolt, and again, finish it off with a hex nut. Because I have this on, I'm going to repeat the same process over on the other side.For our bolts here in the center, we're going to take a U shaped spacer block, conical tooth washer, and finish it with the hex nut. At this point, we can tighten all our hardware down, and we're going to do this in a particular order. We're going to start with the center bolts and work our way to the sides. The bolts that we're going to tighten down first will be all the hardware that's actually attaching our rails to the truck bed and the mounting brackets. So once you have all the hardware that's connecting the rails to the brackets all tight, you're going to want to come back and tighten down the bolts that are actually connecting the brackets to the frame rail.So now we're going to use that same tightening sequence, except this time with a torque wrench. We torque all the hardware down to the amount specified in the instructions. Now that all the hardware's torqued down to the proper spec, I went ahead and just re-secured our exhaust and reinstalled the heat shield the opposite way that we removed it, and that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Reese quick install custom installation kit with base rails on our 2020 Ram 2,500.