SolidStep Lift Assist Kit for 30" to 33" RV Doors

Video Transcript for Lippert SolidStep Lift Assist Kit Installation - 2016 Forest River Salem Hemisphere Lite Travel Trai

Hey guys, Shane here with etrailer.com. Today I have a 2016 Forest River Salem Hemisphere Lite Travel Trailer. And I want to walk you through how to install the Lippert Components SolidStep Lift Assist.Now, if you're not familiar with the SolidStep, I'm going to highly recommend these. When you compare them to like your old ones that you have to fold out from underneath the vehicle or underneath the camper, the metal ones, they tend to rust. They don't really hold up as well. These make it very easy.

They simply fold up inside the door and stay inside when you're not using them.Keep in mind. You do have to use a little bit of effort to get them up. They are all aluminum and they are lightweight, but you do have to lift them. Adding a lift assist with a solid step assembly is going to make it to where you are using very little effort, if no effort at all, to get your steps up because the weight of the steps is being supported by the shock assembly mounted on the inside of the trailer. So if you watch, I'm going to lift this with one finger and it's going to lift itself.

Maybe you're older or maybe you have a hard time lifting anything, you can see there, there is not really any lifting that we have to do. The shock itself is going to support the weight of the steps. Once we get up so high, where all you have to do is push it in lock inside the door.When we open it, again, the shock is going to support it. One finger. We can fold our steps out.

Very easy, very simple to not only fold your steps up in the stowed position, but to open your camper up when you're ready to use them. Even if I grab it up here at this top step, I can still lift it with one finger.This is what our assembly is going to look like on the inside. See, it has a nice cover that covers our strut. If we fold it up you can see how our strut is mounted in there. When we fold our step up, the strut is going to fully extend.

This bracket is going to sit down here on the floor. It's going to have a plate that comes back here that assists in lifting.As far as the installation, it's pretty simple and straightforward. It's going to come with all the necessary hardware and components to get it installed. It's going to come with the bracket that mounts on the inside of the wall. It's going to come with two different struts, one for three steps and one for four steps, depending on your setup. It's also going to come with a sill plate. It's going to have to replace your existing sill plate on your steps in order for it to work with the lift assist.Now that we've gone over some of the features, I'll show you how to get it installed. To start your installation, if you have solid steps already installed, you need to remove them. If you had purchased solid steps to install the solid steps with the lift assist the installation process for removing everything off of them is going to be the same. You'll need a 3/16th hex key and a half inch socket. We're going to remove this threshold. We're going to have three bolts here. And three bolts here. For one of them on each side, you're going to need a half inch wrench because it's up behind this lip here.You're going to take the new one that comes in your kit. We're going to line it up and your kit is going to come with new hardware to get it installed. And then it should line up with the same holes or your maybe other hardware. Next, we need to remove our transport lock. On the inside of the step, you're going to have a plate that runs down to it. You're going to have four bolts on each side. We're going to use a 3/8ths socket for the nut side and an eighth inch X key for the inside. Now I'll remove our old one and install our new one. We're going to slide it into place.You'll notice these triangular pieces here. If you install it this way and it hits your step, this next step down, you can take it, you can flip it over, install it this way. We're going to line it up with the holes and then install our hardware. Once you have your new lock, tighten it back into place and take your steps. And we're going to set them in place off the left-hand doorframe, you're gonna measure 2 and 5/8ths to this edge.Next, we're going to take a seven 30 seconds drill bit. We're going have two access holes here on the top of this plate. We drill into the floor. If you have laminate flooring, you're going to have bolts that are going to go all the way through it. You want to make sure your drill all the way down to the bottom. If you have wood flooring, it's going to come with wood screws. One thing to keep in mind, it's important to go off the new measurements for installing the Lift Assist. It may not line up with the holes from your SolidSteps that you previously had installed.We're going to take the bolt. We're going to go through the hole all the way down through the bottom. On the bottom side of each one of those, we're going to put a flat washer, lock washer and a nut. We need to make sure we install our backing plate on the bottom. Before we install the flat washer, lock washer and nut on the two bolts. Notice how it kind of has an angle or an extra piece here. You want to make sure that it's facing towards the left door jam or doorframe. This is towards the frame.Now these two brackets here, if you had the old foldout steps from when the camp or was the original steps from the, when the camper was new, this bracket may still be in there. To get this plate installed, you're going to have to take it off of this bolt. I can't get it to come all the way out. So we had to move it over to the side. So we have enough room for this extra lip here. Next we're going to carefully lift our steps up. We're going to take a 7/16ths socket. We're going to loosen this bolt, this one and this one on each side.We're gonna slide the bracket out. When it just inside the door frame there, and then we'll tighten those back down. So one thing we found is even extending this out all the way you can see it's not close to our doorframe. So what we're going to do is we try to slide it over as far as we could to get it close and it's not getting over far enough. So what we're going to do is I'm going to drill a hole right on this edge here on this edge so that we can take this whole plate and slide it over to get this to meet the doorframe.Now we're going to slide it over and get that extended out as far as we can get it.So now that we've adjusted it where it's going to fit inside the door, we want to make sure that this bracket here is not coming out too far. It needs to be as close to the inside of the door frame as possible so that when our new bracket goes in place with our shock on it, that attached to there, that shock run straight up and down. It's not at an angle. So it looks like we're pretty good here. Now we can lift it back up and install our remaining bolts. These are going to install the same way. We're just going to drill down through the floor, install the same hardware that we installed on those two. Once we get all of our screws tightened down, we can go ahead and reinstall our threshold backing plate.Now that we've got everything tightened down to the floor, we can go ahead and move inside the trailer and start installing our components in there. We're going to have to remove any trim pieces because this bracket is going to get mounted to the wall, but it needs to be up close to our door edge. So what we're going to do is I'm going to slide this over. I'm going to mark it right up here at the top, so I can take this off and then cut that bottom part off so we can slide this all the way over. Now that we've got our trim piece cut and take this and test fit it to make sure we cut it high enough.Also this piece down here on the floor, you may have to cut that off. I was able to cut it with a utility knife. It was pretty easy, just so that this back down on the bottom just sits against the wall. So what you want is you want about a quarter inch gap in there just enough, so that as this swings up, it doesn't make contact with it. Once you get it set in place, you're going to take your hardware and use these holes all the way down and mount it right to the wall. We're going to take a five 32nd strobe bit, and we're going to pre drill the holes.Next, we're going to take our number 10 wood screws and nut to the wall. Next we're going to install the strut. You're going to get two struts. One that says 600 in and the other one says 800 in. The 800 in is for four steps. The 600 end is going to be for three steps. With our steps in the stowed position, we're going to take this and we're going to pop it right on the end of that ball like that, and learn, take the other end. And we're going to pop this on that bracket.Once you get your strut on, if it's installed properly, there should be a gap right here. This bracket should never touch the floor. Once you get it on and unlock it. And you fold your steps out, the Strait is actually going to support your steps like that. You're actually going to have to kind of pull on them a little bit to get them down, but when you're putting them up, it's going to be a lot easier. You're not going to really have any lifting to do. That's going to do it for a look at and installation on the Lippert Components, SolidStep Lift Assist.