Curt Custom Fifth Wheel Installation Kit for Ram Truck - Carbide Finish

Video Transcript for Curt Custom Fifth Wheel Hitch Kit Installation - 2022 Ram 2500

Hey guys, it's Jake here with etrailer. Today we have a 2022 Ram 2500, and we're taking a look at and I'm gonna show you how to install the CURT in-bed 5th wheel rails. These rails are going to fit any industry standard 5th wheel head. There's three different distances between the holes. You have the closest, the middle, and then the furthest most outset. So depending on what your industry standard 5th wheel head, or 5th wheel hitch, whatever size holes they fit, as long as it's industry standard, it'll fit these rails.

They're gonna have a real thick, sturdy steel construction with a carbide black powder coat finish. I like the carbide finish a lot more than a gloss finish because what it's gonna do is it's gonna be tougher. Because throughout the year, you may not have your 5th wheel head back here all the time, and what these will do is the finish on here will help to protect that paint from chipping off. What I've seen a lot of people do is they'll take either a rubber mat, a horse mat, or a couple of sheets of plywood, and essentially all they'll do is they'll either lay one sheet of plywood across and then that's your new bed floor. Or you'll cut sections of, say, horse mat, just a thicker one-inch rubber, and set it in each of these sections and it'll allow you to slide many different things in your truck bed without hitting your rails.

The one thing that is annoying is if you have something a little bit odd shaped and you can't fit it in one or the other section, it can be kind of goofy to get things to fit. So it may take a little bit of modification to your bed to be able to get things to work as it did before without these rails in it. Now the nice part about these rails is that although they are above your bed, they are only gonna stick up at about an inch above the higher portion of your corrugation. So again, if you get a one inch mat or something to put in the three sections, you should be more than fine to use your bed as normal. I know people that use that technique all year round so they don't have to worry about using the bed of their truck.

You can still pick up loads of rock, different things like that, and your 5th wheel hitch will still fit as long as you put something in those sections. Another thing is that's nice with these being industry standard is that if you decide later on down the road that you have a standard 5th wheel hitch and you wanna move to a slider, or vice versa, if you have a sliding hitch and you don't think you need it anymore and you want to upgrade to a different style 5th wheel hitch, you just have to make sure that it'll fit one of these three slot holes or that it's industry standard and it'll drop right in these rails. As far as the installation goes, this is a custom fit installation. The only holes that you'll have to drill are going to be the holes that you will install in your bed. That's gonna be normal for any in-bed rail kit.

You're gonna have to drill holes 'cause you have to get the bolts through the bed somehow. But I will say, if I'm being completely honest, this is one of the more difficult ones that I've installed. The brackets will bolt right to the factory weld nuts in the frame, but it's getting to them, the front left bracket, which is your driver's side front bracket, is by far the most difficult. It's very difficult to get up in between the frame rail and the gas tank, or the fuel tank, in this case, to be able to get the hardware in place. So if you're doing it yourself, you just have to be patient. I would definitely give yourselves anywhere between six and eight hours to get it done. You can definitely get it done in one day, but you're also going to want to have an extra set of hands. You can do most of it by yourself, but when it comes to installing the handle nut that has to go into the hat channel for one of the bolts for the passenger side, you're definitely gonna have to have somebody in the wheel well holding that handle nut there so that you can thread the bolt in from the top. But speaking of the installation, let's go ahead and jump into it and show you how we did it. To begin our installation, we'll need to start by removing our spare tire. It will go back into place. We just need to get it out of the way in order to make some more space for us to get our hardware in place. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go around our 5th wheel rails. Our lower brackets are gonna attach to weld nuts on our frame. And you'll see two of them here. There's gonna be two on the opposite side and two up front. Your front ones are gonna be located up in this area. You can see we've got some wiring and some hoses in the way. Essentially, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to each side of those weld nuts and pop anything outta the way, that is in the way currently, so that we can get our brackets in place. And then once we're done, then we can put it all back. We'll just take a trim panel tool. I've got an extended one here that'll help us get up here behind and you just wanna pop this stuff loose. These are just going to be those, they look like little trees like that. You just wanna pop those loose so that we can slide that bracket behind it. And when getting your front brackets in place, this gap here is to go over the hat channel. So your hat channel of your bed will fit in here, and these two holes are going to line up with the two holes that are in our frame rail. What we need to do is lift it up into place. I will say the driver's side is much more difficult, but this one's a lot easier to see. That's why we're showing you this side. We'll take this bracket and slide it up. And essentially, you want these two holes to line up. We'll let that rest there. We're gonna have a big thick spacer which is designed to slide up behind this bracket and fill in this gap right here. Now, we'll take one of our short hex head bolts and a conical toothed washer and get it started hand tight. Then we can take our spacer. This can be tricky. We wanna slide it up behind there, get the holes to line up. There we go. And then you'll have to line it up with the holes in the frame rail. Then we can take our spacer, slide it up behind our bracket. And we'll take the slightly longer bolt, it's about a half inch longer than the shorter bolts we used for the front hole, and we'll get that lined up and start threading it into the weld nut. Over on our driver's side, like I said, it's a little bit more difficult. But essentially, what we did is we took our bracket, stuck it up in here, you have to pull this wire this way, these sensor wires this way, and then the brake lines you gotta pull down. You shove the bracket up in here and then pull it back and line it up with the holes, put that same spacer behind it over here. And then you want to pry the bracket forward. We just pry it off of this crossmember tube. We're gonna pry on the bracket forward and then snug up your bolts. Now you'll take your bracket, slide it as far back as you can. If it's touching the hat channel, that's okay, but you wanna slide it towards the rear of the vehicle and then we'll snug these up. (driver bit whirring) Now with our brackets lined up, we'll take a center punch and we'll want to punch the center of our holes in our bracket here. (center punch bangs) And then we'll take a pilot drill bit and come up here and draw out two pilot holes so that we know where our brackets are located from the top of a bed. (drill bit whirring) Now we need to come up inside the bed. We'll put our front rail in place. And there's gonna be four sets of holes here. You want to use the second one in from the outside. Make sure that all your pilot holes are lining up. If you have to make any adjustments, make sure you line up as many holes as you can, and like we had one hole that was just slightly off over here, about a eighth of an inch. So we made any adjustments we needed and drilled a new pilot hole that still is going down through that bracket below. It's just slightly off centered, but it still should work just fine. Now we're gonna take a step bit. If you don't have a step bit, you can just use a series of drill bits, but essentially, we need to drill these holes out to 9/16 of an inch. We're gonna use a step bit for most of it 'cause it just it'll go a lot faster than having to switch drill bits every time. But we'll drill it out close to about a half inch and then we'll take the 9/16 drill bit and finish it off. (step bit whirring) Now we're gonna take a clear coat pen and coat that bare metal that we just exposed by drilling the hole, and we can now set our rail back in place. (rail thuds) We'll take our hardware, you wanna take some spacer blocks, slide 'em underneath the rail. This is so that you don't crush this corrugation here. And we'll take our bolts and slide 'em down through. You want to get your bolts in placed temporarily and then we'll take a pilot drill bit and you wanna drill out this forward most center hole. (drill bit whirring) You wanna pull your rail out of the way. Drill this hole out to 9/16, just like the other ones, and then we can get all of our hardware in place and get it tightened down. (drill bit whirring) Now back underneath our vehicle, what we need to do is we need to temporarily install our flange nuts to kind of draw our brackets up to the rails that we just put in the bed. What we did do is we loosened up these two bolts that we have on the side of our frame rail to let us have a little bit more travel. But we're just gonna loosely install these on here. And we're gonna, essentially, use them to draw this bracket up to the bottom of the corrugation. (driver bit whirring) After we get those flange nut snugged up underneath, our rail is now being held in place. We're gonna take our 5th wheel hitch and set it in our rails. If you don't have a 5th wheel hitch yet and you're just getting these installed, you're gonna want to use a measurement from the center of these rail holes to the center of the rear rail holes. And you're gonna want to use 22 inches. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use the hitch that we're installing today, but I'm still going to take a measurement just to be sure. So you wanna line it up with the holes in the rail just like that. And then we can take a measurement. It should be that 22-inch mark 'cause that is going to be the industry standard for a rail kit. Yep, and it's 22 on the nose right there. Now we're gonna double check a couple other measurements. We wanna make sure that our rails are centered from our wheel well to wheel well because the hitch does have a little bit of play in it, and side to side. And looks like we can go over just a little bit, about an eighth of an inch. We're looking at right at four inches there. We'll get right about four inches there. So that's gonna work out great. Now we can mark the same holes that we use for our front rail. We're gonna mark two on either side in the second set of holes and then one here at the most rear hole. (drill bit whirring) Now we're gonna take our pilot drill bit and drill a pilot hole (drill bit whirring) right in the middle of each of the bracket holes the same way we did on the front. Now we can take our step bit and drill it out to 9/6. (step bit whirring) Now what you wanna do before we go back underneath to put our rear brackets on, you wanna put your rear rail back in place, put your 5th wheel in place, and you want to measure from side to side to make sure that our rail is centered with all our hardware in it. Once you get your pilot holes drilled for your two inner bolts, again we're gonna be using this hole and this hole, we want to use your step bit to open 'em up. (step bit whirring) Now with our holes drilled out, the hardware on the rear rail on the rear side of it towards the back of your truck, it's gonna take the same carriage bolts that your front rail did. On the front portion of our back rail, we're gonna have to use the large carriage bolt on the driver's side. This is to go through the entire hat channel. And then on our passenger side, we'll have to use a hex bolt. It'll look like this in the kit. It'll have the coarse threads, not the fine threads. For our driver's side bracket, you'll see the clear difference. There's only one of these tabs on the passenger side bracket. The driver's side has two to make up for this hat channel. We'll take that same bolt hardware that we used earlier. Thread that in. Now we can get our hardware in place on the top two bolts. And we can grab our spacer blocks, slide them in place, followed by a flange nut. Now underneath, the hole that came through our hat channel for that long bolt passer, we're gonna have to open that up to 7/8 of an inch so we can fit this spacer tube up inside there. This is just gonna give the hat channel some support when we go to torque down the hardware. We're just gonna use our step bit in order to do this. (step bit whirring) And we'll take another clear coat pen and just coat the inside of this opening. Now we can take our two spacer with our bolt pushed through. Push this up into the hat channel. And there we go. We'll use the bracket that we're gonna install next to drive it the rest of the way up through there. Now we'll take our side bracket, lift it up into place, take our bolts, the same ones we use on the front brackets, to attach to the frame rail with our conical toothed washers on 'em. Get those loosely installed. And we'll take a spacer block and a nut and install it on these two bolts. Now to get our passenger side bracket in place, what we did was we went ahead and removed the heat shield so that you guys can see it a lot better. It is gonna be easier to put this up there without the heat shield in place, but you can get it behind there with it still being there. We'll slide it over our bolt there and then thread our frame hardware in. And we'll take another spacer block, slide it over our bolt, and then thread on a flange nut. Now for our rear center bolt and our front center bolt, you'll want to put a spacer block and a flange nut on there. And we went ahead and tightened that up. And then the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go lower our vehicle back down and we'll have to take the nut plate, slide it through the end of our hat channel, and thread the bolt from the top into that nut. Now from the top, we're gonna drop a conical toothed washer down and then our bolt. Now we can stick the handle nut through the end of our hat channel and thread our bolts in place. Now that we've got the rest of our hardware in place, we came back to our two front brackets. We took the two knots off, each side. And then on the front bracket portion, you'll want to use a normal spacer block, put your nut back on. And on the rear one, you'll want to use the offset spacer. It'll have a hole that's offset a center, and then we'll put our nut back on, and we'll do the same for the driver's side. Now with all of our hardware properly installed, we'll go down, tighten everything down, and then come back with a torque wrench and torque it to the specifications in the instructions. Well, guys, once you get everything torqued down, I will say one note, don't forget to torque down that hex bolt that's on the top. Otherwise, everything else is gonna have to get torqued from the bottom. But after you get everything torqued down, that's gonna do it for the installation. Well, guys, hopefully this video helped you decide whether or not the CURT industry standard in-bed rails for 5th wheel heads is right for your 2022 Ram 2500.