Video of TorkLift GlowStep Revolution Uprising Steps w/ Booster Step - 4 Steps - 28" Base - 325 lbs
Video Transcript for TorkLift GlowStep Revolution Uprising Steps Installation - 2015 Northwood Arctic Fox Fifth Wheel
Shane: Hey everyone, Shane here with eTrailer.com. Today I have a 2015 Northwood Arctic Fox 27' Fifth Wheel and I'm going to be showing you how to install the TorkLift GlowStep Revolution Uprising.What would be the reason we'd want to add different steps to our camper Well if we come down here, we take a look at the steps that normally come on your campers. Steel construction and they tend to rust fairly quick, so they become hard to put in and out. Plus, they're floating steps, so there's nothing touching the ground, so when we walk on these there's not a whole lot of stability there. You can see they kind of move around. Plus, if you're inside the camper sleeping and you come out at night, or somebody's sleeping, you got to walk in, you're shaking the camper around.With TorkLift steps you can see these are going to fold inside the door, so once we leave, close our door, our steps stay inside.
We don't have to worry about them staying outside in the weather. But they're easy to fold out, we simply fold them down, we'll grab this lower bar, I'm going to pull them out like this. We can adjust our feet and then we're ready to go. And you can see these are a lot more stable than our free-hanging steps. These are going to have a 325 pound weight capacity.
They're going to be aluminum construction, so we don't have to worry about the rust and corrosion. All of our hinges, hardware . Our hardware is going to be a stainless steel construction, again we don't have to worry about rust or corrosion, or anything like that.I mentioned the GlowSteps, they're going to have sticker that runs down each step. Now five minutes of direct light will give you 10 hours of glow. So you can see with all of our lights off each one of our steps has a glow sticker on it that help when walking at night.These are going to be a scissor style, so you'll notice we have three hinge points, and what that allows us to do is it allows us to fold up our steps into a nice compact space, so it's not a whole lot of room that it would be taking it up.
It makes it easy to pull out and to push back in, unlike some of the other steps. Where on the factory steps that come out, once you get your second step in there it might be kind of hard to lift up those two steps to slide them in place. Where with these being aluminum they're nice and lightweight, we don't have to worry about all that extra weight.Now let's say we park somewhere and we have a little un-level terrain, each leg is going to have 12 holes that allows us to adjust this leg in 1" increments. The footpad, on the bottom, you can see a nice wide base, so it gives us plenty of stability once we're on the ground but it has four rubber pads, so it gives us a grip when it's down.Now this is actually the four step design, so you're probably asking yourself, "Well if it's a four step design what's the extra step" They actually call this a booster step. So what you would do is there's a lever down here that locks it, and you'd slide it over, and this allows you to extend the steps out farther or even to give you a little bit more height for ground that may be a little bit lower, different terrain levels.
And this bottom step is a little bit closer to the ground for somebody that may have a problem actually stepping up higher.Now if I didn't mention this before these steps, these are the 28" wide ones and that's this inside bracket. Our step is actually going to be 8" by 22-1/2". Each one is going to have raised corrugation, almost, on it to provide tread if your steps we're wet. We'll come up here to this bracket and you'll notice it kind of wraps all the way down. This is to provide support so if you're walking up here and you happen to maybe step a little bit forward you don't have to worry about your foot sliding in there, so it gives you plenty of protection there. We're going to have a nice grip here, so when we're stepping up here, with this being a metal surface if it gets wet obviously it's going to be slick, so having the grip tape there we can step on it and we're not going to have to worry about sliding.Now being 28" that's this bracket right here. Inside edge to inside edge of this bracket's going to be 28". And how you measure that is this flange on your doorframe, inside edge to inside edge. So that's what you need to measure to get the correct size steps, correct width steps. And then you want to take a measurement from the ground to the top of your sill plate right here. So you can see what we're measuring, we're measuring the inside of that lip and we're at 28", so that's the measurement you'd need to get you the correct steps. Now to measure your height you're going to measure from the ground to the top edge of your threshold right there. And these steps are going to fit 34-7/8 up to 42-3/8 distance there.Now, as I mentioned, these are very easy to fold back up into place. So we're going to lift them up, if you have your booster step out there's a lever down here on the bottom, you're going to push it over, fold it up into place, and you're going to rotate them right inside the door, just like that. Now let's say you wanted to take these out for some reason, these are actually not bolted in place, so they're very simple to get out. You're going to fold them up like this, we're going to rotate them back just a little, we're going to lift and they come out fairly easy.Maybe you're asking yourself, "Well if they're not actually attached to anything how do they keep from bouncing around inside the camper when you're going down the road" Well right on the inside here, on this bracket, there are rubber boots. What they do is they sit against the plate right here. When you're installing it you close your screen door and you push the steps up against your screen door, you can see these rubber pads here. Push it up against the screen door, you adjust those boots up against this plate, and when close your screen door it keeps this solid against it, so we don't have any movement out of the steps.Another thing I like about these steps is you can also get hand railing, you can find those here at eTrailer. The railing can go from the bottom up to the top, it mounts to the side of your camper to give you a little extra stability when walking in and out of the camper.Another thing they offer is if you have pets a lot of times if you have steps that are open a dog will get nervous about going up the steps because they can see through it and they're worried about falling through. Well TorkLift makes a cover that has hook and loop fastener, and it basically mounts to the backside lip of your step and provides them with a cover so they can't see through, they feel a lot safer when they're going in and out.Another thing that they make, and this is a really neat thing, now this is a shoe scrubber. And where this mounts, it mounts right to the side of the step, and you basically just set it down on there. Put it right on the bracket and it allows you to clean off your shoes, boots, whatever it may be, before you walk up your steps into your camper, so you're leaving all the dirt and debris out here, and not dragging it inside.Now we didn't remove this customer steps, or the factory steps, that came on the camper because they are actually welded in. If you have welded in steps and you want to remove them, or if you have bolt in steps and you want to remove those, you can find storage boxes that will fill this space, and you can find those here at eTrailer, to give you a little extra storage for any of those other items that you may want to bring with you.To start your installation we need to remove this piece here, if you have it. Most of them are going to be square heads, it looks like two of them are missing here. We'll take a square head bit, go ahead and remove those, and remove that. Next thing you need to do, if you have a trim piece it's going to have to be trimmed around the bracket. This bracket here we're actually not going to be trimming, this is actually part of the doorframe, but if you have any trim like this, that is covering this location around the door, it will have to be trimmed. This piece here because it's part of the doorframe we're actually just going to sandwich that and drill right through it.So you'll notice here, facing the door, or facing the inside of the camper, you'll notice there's a gap. I need to get this flat so it's compressed up against there. So we're going to have to do a little bit of . I'm going to pull the screws out here, slide this out, and see if there's something stuck back there. I may end up actually having to trim the bottom off because it looks like it might be going down into the floor a little bit. We need to make sure that that's flat before we get our bracket installed.And these are just Phillips head screws that are running along this one, yours may be a little bit different. So what I want to do is I want to take out enough that I can pull this bottom out without bending this, so even if I have to go most of the way up the door that's okay because we can put these screws back in.So there's a little bit of sealer there, that was probably keeping it out, so I'll trim that down and then see if we can't open up this gap a little bit so we can get it flat. So now that we're able to get it flat, a little bit of trimming in a few little spots, we can go ahead and put our screws back in, and start installing our bracket.Next we're going to pull out this bracket. And it's up to you, I'm going to go ahead and pull these off to make it a bit easier when I'm drilling my holes. Your two Allen wrenches come with your kit and then you'll use a 9/16 for the nut side. Just take note of how these washers are on with the nylon spacer there on the outside here. There's going to be a plate that holds these two in line, so just take note of how that is together there. And you don't necessarily have to take them off. They will have to come off later when you install the steps, I'm just going to do it now and make it a little bit easier on myself.I'm going to pull by bracket all the way up against the frame and we're going to make sure it's centered, because what we're doing is we're going to drill through this flange here on our doorframe and our bolt is actually going to go through there. So we want to make sure you're as centered as you can get. And you'll notice the top of this bracket here kind of bends in, so what I'm going to do . It runs pretty level with this edge, I'm going to drill out my bottom ones first and get them mounted, that'll keep my bracket in place and then I can push this top side over enough where it's level, or even, and I can drill those out.So I found it's going to be kind of hard to drill, or to even mark it with a drill bit, the way it is. So if you notice the hole is elongated running this way and then it Ts, so it basically goes like this. There's a little edge right there where it widens out, I'm actually lining up that edge with this so that it's even on both sides, and I'm just going to take a marker and I'm going to mark the bottom holes. That way I can pull it off and then drill it out.I'm going to start with a small drill bit, so I can do a pilot hole to make sure it's going through in the right spot. We're going to be opening it up to 7/16. So now we're going to repeat this same thing over on the other side.Now in our kit you're going to get some bolts, lock washers, and flat washers, and then the nuts. These are just going to be temporarily mounted to hold my bracket in place so I can get the top part of the bracket straight. So go ahead and insert a hardware on each side here. And I'm not putting a lock washer in, I'm just putting the flat washer on now. Make sure that this where it's not going to move on us. Now we can come back and get these lined up correctly, mark those. We can go ahead and take our hardware back off, and drill out our remaining holes. Once we get one side drilled we'll repeat the same thing on the other side.We'll go ahead and get our hardware put in place on both sides. On the back side you're going to use a flat washer, a lock washer, and then the nut. We'll come back with a 3/8 socket and we're going to tighten the hardware, and then we're going to torque it to the specifications in the instructions. Next we're going to get these put back in. Again, just take note of when you took them off how they go back on. This one is going to be the lower one. Now my flat washer and then the nut. Flat washer on the outside, rotate that bracket up and get it onto that second bolt, then we'll go flat washer and then our nylon lock nut. And we're not going to tighten these right now because we want to be able to move them but we are going to snug them up to where there's not a lot of play in them. And we're using, again, a 9/16 wrench here.Now before we get our steps set in place, a couple steps ahead it may require you to take out these screws right here. Because if you put your steps in, tighten everything down, close your door and your door's tight, you're going to have to loosen these up, come back, take these out, readjust your steps. So what we're going to do, because these bolts stick out pretty far, I'm pretty much betting that with that plate sticking out the door's going to be tight, so I'm going to go ahead and just take them out. Ideally what we want is the plate, for the steps, we want it to sit as tight up against here as possible. So, again, you want to make sure that these, you can freely slide these forwards and backwards.We're going to take our steps, and it may be easier with two people, you'll notice this bracket here has a hook on it. This is going to go over the large bolt with the large spacer on it, so we're going to take it, lift it up, we're going to hook that onto that bolt with that spacer, and then we'll rotate our steps down. Like that.Next we'll rotate our steps down, pull out on our bottom step, and go ahead and get that set on the ground. What we're going to do is we're going to take and we're going to push it to where it's sitting as flush up against our threshold as possible. Once we get there we're going to come in with the included Allen wrenches, we'll go ahead and tighten these down. When we're tightening these we don't have to over tighten them because they're not really holding anything in place. We just want them tight that the steps, being pushed all the way up against our threshold, it stays there and these don't move. Next we're going to loosen these rubber bumpers where we can slide them.Now from this point forward it is going to require two people. However, in our case because we did not remove these steps, we're not going to need a second person. Now if you have a second door obviously you're not going to need two people because the rest of the work is going to be done inside with the steps folded up like this and the screen door closed. If you remove these you ought to have a second person because then you're going to be stuck in there, you're not going to be able to put the steps down.On the bottom of this plate there's going to be two rubber bumpers. What we want to do is we're going to close our screen door, we're going to take our steps, we're going to push it to where they make contact with the screen door. Then we're going to come back and we're going to tighten the bolt that's holding this bumper in place. You want to make sure you're not putting a whole lot of pressure on your screen door because it is pretty thin and you don't want it to flex out.Now with everything adjusted what we're going to do is we're going to close our screen door and then close our main door. So everything's good there. What I'll do is we'll go ahead and fold our steps up, and then close our doors. You can see it closes well. Go ahead and test it here again. Looks like we're good.Once you've got everything tightened up, you've closed your doors, opened up, both with the steps folded up and down, you're basically ready to go. They do mention there's a ramp right here on this bottom plate, if you take your steps out, which most people probably are not going to do that, but if you decide to take your steps out there's a gap between your threshold and this plate. When you're sweeping everything out the door it could potentially go down underneath that bracket. If you want to you can put a bead of silicone on there, a black silicone or a clear, just to help keep any of that debris from getting down under there. You can find different kinds of silicone here at eTrailer. Other than that you're ready to go.It's going to do it for the look at, and installation, on TorkLift's GlowSteps on a 2015 Northwood's Arctic Fox Fifth Wheel..
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