Curt Custom Fifth Wheel Kit Installation - 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 2500
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How to Install the Curt Custom Fifth Wheel Kit on a 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 2500
Jake: Hey guys, Jake here with etrailer. Today we're going to be taking a look at, I'm going to show you how to install the CURT In Bed Rails for 5th wheel hitches. Now today we're going to be installing this on a 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 2500. The installation is not too bad. The rails themselves are going to have a very thick steel construction with a carbide black finish on it, so it's going to be very durable.You're not going to have to worry about, because these are going to be permanently installed in the bed of your truck, you're not going to have to worry about rust or corrosion getting to them because of that thick carbide finish. It's also not going to chip, I guess standard powder coat finishes.
We've had a lot of these come through etrailer and we've just seen a lot of good things come out of this carbide finish.The three different sets of holes is going to be four 5th wheel hitches with different weight capacity, so your center ones are obviously going to be your lighter duty and then your medium, and then your heavy-duty is going to be spread out close to over top of your rails on your truck. Now, if you're wondering about how much space these are going to take up on the inside of your bed because they are going to be permanently installed, it's only going to be about an inch or the taller of the two corrugations in your bed, so still going to be low enough.If you use your truck for work or for little projects around the house, you can still slide plywood and sheets of dry wall or packet full of sporting equipment for the weekends. They're not going to take up a lot of space and because they're angled on the front, it should be more than easy enough to be able to slide a board up and over top of them.Now this kit is going to come with custom fit brackets to fit your 2020 Silverado. What's nice about this is that it's going to utilize a hole in the frame to be able to put this nice large bolt in to hold our side rails in place. And then on the backside, you can see it's just going to clamp down on our side rails of our truck frame with a U-bolt that'll just slide right over top of the frame.Now these rails are going to be compatible for various different types of brands of 5th wheel hitches, so that's a nice feature, so you're not going to have to worry about if you have an older 5th wheel hitch that you've just purchased a newer vehicle, these rails should be able to work with them.
The hardware is going to come included, so you're not going to have to provide any of that on your own. And the installation is pretty straightforward.With that being said, let's go ahead and show you how to get it installed. You're going to start by removing your spare tire. Now if you don't know where to access your spare tire at, it's going to be under this circle, this plastic cover. Take your driver key and insert it in the key slot, turn it, and then you'll pull this out and it'll take your spare tire tool and lower your spare tire.To get our first rail in place, what we're going to need to do is we're going to need to take three measurements from the back of our bed.
So we'll measure from the back of our bed here. Now you can see our bedliner's pretty thick from factory, so we're going to need to add about an eighth of an inch from measurements in the directions, and you'll make a mark and that's where we're going to set the back of our rear rail. You're going to make three measurements, one here, one in the center, and then one on the other side.The reason we picked this corrugation is because this one's kind of difficult to mark because it's not going to sit on that full corrugation there. So we've got ours marked, laid out. What you want to do, then you want to measure from side to side and you want it to be equal between your wheel wells.
So we look pretty good there.So now what we can do is we can take an eighth-inch drill bit and on our third hole in, we're going to drill a pilot hole on the inside in the center of it. Your directions are going to say to take a take a pen and put a mark on the bed and look up from underneath. It's going to be very hard with an in bedliner to be able to see that dent that you're going to put in the bed. So we're just going to drill a small pilot hole and then go up underneath and see where we're at. We'll go ahead and do that for both sides.Now we're going to come to our driver's side wheel well and we're going to take our bracket. The bracket with the longer side towards the rear of the vehicle is going to be for the driver's side. They're going to go up and over the frame. So the other one, the longer side will be on this side. So put that on the passenger side and you can see our drill bit sticking down through our bed where we just drilled our hole, our pilot hole. We're going to line that up with the center of the rear most hole, lift it up in place and then up here on the front, I'm going to make sure it's lining up with your factory hole.There'll be a hole here up on the front. You can see all of our holes are lined up, so we can continue drilling holes for our rails. Once you've got it figured out where you need these two most outer holes in, if you've got these drilled in the right place, all your other holes should line up perfectly. So we can go ahead and start drilling the rest of our pilot holes. And for our center holes on the rear bracket, we're going to be using the rear most holes, so the hole closest to our tailgate and on the front bracket we're going to be using the front most hole.And we can go ahead and move our bracket out of the way so we can enlarge each one of our pilot holes to 9/16s of an inch to fit the hardware down there. Now with the area vacuumed up, we can take a paint marker or some clear spray paint and what we're going to do is we're going to cover that bare metal so that we don't have to worry about any rust or corrosion later on. We're going to do this or each of the holes that we drill in the bed.Now we can slide our rail back into place and insert our hardware. You're going to be using the smaller carriage bolts. There's only going to be two larger carriage bolts, so they should be pretty easy to identify. Now we can go underneath and get our side rails in place. Now we're in our driver's side wheel well. Take one of our fish wires, put our spacer block on. Spacer block is going to be the one with the largest square hole on it, because we're going to be using the larger bolts that we referred to earlier.Take that bolt, thread it onto our fish wire until it's all the way on and we can take our bolt, slide it in this hole here in our frame. And what's nice about this installation is the bolts actually going to be coming out of the same hole too. So what we'll do is we'll throw the bolts in there, take our plate, put it in there. Now we can take our bracket and now what you couldn't see there is that I pulled the fish wire through this opening on our side rail, lifted it up into place. We should be able to pull that bolt through.Now that we've got our bolt pulled through, what we can do is we can carefully pull our fish wire off. Then we can insert our nut on it so our bolt doesn't pull that through. We're going to go do this on the passenger side also. Here on the inside of our frame, we're going to be putting this U-bolt in place to get our bracket secured. What we need to do is we need to pop this tab off so we can get our wiring away from our frame. And then what we're going to do is we're going to take our U-bolt lift our plate, our mounting plate into place.They have to move your bolts out a little bit. Slide your U-bolt over and then slide it through the two holes. Then we can take our two nuts and put them on the outside. We're going to do this on both sides. So now for our two bolts at the rear, we're going to take these spacers and it's going to have a notch cut in it. And what this is designed to do is when we tighten down these brackets, we don't want it to crush the corrugation in our bed, so we put it around that bolt. If you need to use a pair of pliers or something, a lot of times it's hard to get your fingers in there, but put it long ways up in that gap and then we can take another spacer.This one's going to act as a washer because our openings in the bottom of our bracket on the side are so large. We're going to insert this like this on our bolt and then put on a nut. And we're going to do this same process for this bolt and the two bolts on the passenger side. And for our center bolt for our rear rail, what you want to do is you want to put one of these plates on and then a nut and then take that spacer block and slide it up in between again so we don't crush the corrugation.Now we can actually tighten up to the bed. Now we take a 3/4 inch socket and tighten all of our nuts; the five nuts on our rear rail. Now what we're going to do, this is going to set our 5th wheel base in place, set it in our rails, and then for our front rail you can take it, set it down, lift up on our base, slide it into place. Now we've got our 5th wheel leg set in place. We did have to make a few minor adjustments to our legs. They we're a little off, but we've got them set down in our holes.The next thing you're going to do is you're going to measure from the wheel well to the edge of our rail; front rail here just like we did on the first rail. And make sure it's even on both sides and then what you'll do is you'll take the rail and push it up against the front of each of our pinholes here, to make sure it's tight up against our rails. So once you've done all that, made sure it's nice and square in the bed. On our center hole on our front rail, like we said earlier, we're going to be using this front hole. We can mark it with a paint marker and then again on our two end holes. It'll be in the third hole.Now we can go ahead and remove our front rail and drill our pilot holes and then widen our holes to 9/16ths of an inch. And we'll get our rail back in place, line up our holes and drop our hardware down. To get our hardware inserted on this bolt here on the front and the two other bolts that are farthest most forward, we're going to start with a solid washer with a hole in the middle and followed by your rectangle washer with a square hole and then a nut.This can be a bit difficult to get your hands in there in order to get it in place, all while not pushing the bolt back up through the bed. Now on each side, on our front of our side bracket, you're going to insert another one of these U-shaped spacers up in the top. Again, straddling that bolt so that it doesn't crush this corrugation when we go to tighten it down. Now we take another square washer, slide it on, and then insert our nut. So we'll go ahead and tighten up the five nuts on the five bolts that are on our front rail.Now we're going to torque all of our bolts in our in bed rails before we tighten anything on our side rails. Just going to torque them to the specifications in the instructions. Now there's going to be a bolt on top of your frame here that's going to hold your heat shield in place. In order to torque these two nuts down on the passenger side, we're going to just go ahead and remove that bolt temporarily, bend our heat shield out of the way, get our bolts torqued down to specifications and then reinserted that bolt.We'll take our heat shield and bend it down far enough to be able to get a torque wrench in there. Now we can go ahead and replace all of our heat shield bolt once you've had everything torqued down underneath. Now we can torque down our side brackets.Last thing you want to do is raise your spare tire back up into place and you're ready to go. But with all that being said, and that's going to do it for our look and installation of the in bed rail kit for our 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 2500.
Ron C.
2/16/2020
Ive installed several of these style installation kits into my gmc 2500s and unless the kit comes with two fish wires the video shows the installer destroying the fish wire when removing it from the bolt. In the kits Ive installed the fish wire had to be used on both sides and therefore I had to unscrew it of the bolt threads. This part of the video could be misleading if the kit only comes with one fish wire.
Jason S.
2/18/2020
The Curt Custom Fifth Wheel Installation Kit for Chevy/GMC Truck - Carbide Finish # C16429-204 does come with 2 fishwires as you can see in the attached installation instructions. It is a good idea to be more careful and unscrew the bolt from the fishwire if possible to preserve it. This install is very tight as you can see so the manufacturer provides 2 fishwires.
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Ken R.
4/7/2020
I found helpful to use an extendable magnet automotive type to place the square washers and hold them in place. Also, because the nuts have a built-on washer, a ratcheting closed end 3/4 wrench lets you reach tight areas and at least start the nut. And I taped the bolts down with duct tape so they didnt flop around while trying to put the washers and nuts on. Helpful video, thanks.