Hidden Hitch Trailer Hitch Receiver with Drawbar - Custom Fit - Class I - 1-1/4"

Video Transcript for Trailer Hitch Installation - 2009 Honda Civic

Today on this 2009 Honda Civic we will be installing Draw-Tite hitch part number 24763. This installation will also apply for the Hidden Hitch part number 60822. We are underneath the vehicle and we are actually looking at the passenger side frame rail. We need to do a couple of things in preparation before we can actually get started pointing out the mounting holes for the trailer hitch. As you can see we have got our exhaust here on the passenger side. We need to go ahead and lower it down to get it out of the way. To do that we are going to remove it off of its rubber hanger here using just a spray lubricant like a WD-40. Before we can remove the heat shield, we need to actually remove this plastic shroud from underneath here. Because the fourth bolt for the heat shield is actually covered by our shroud.

And this is also actually helping to cover our driver side frame rail so it will need to come off. Holding the shroud on, there appear to be three bolts and three push pins. To remove the push pin, you can just take a small flathead screwdriver. You can see we have got some small openings here in the ridges. We are also going to remove the heat shield over here on the passenger side. There are four screws that are holding the heat shield in place. We are going to go ahead and lower those down next. Looking at the passenger side frame rail you can see we have got multiple holes here. We are going to be using the second hole in from the end of the frame rail here and we are going to be attaching to that hole with the use of a handle nut and hex bolt conical tooth washer combination.

And what we are going to do is we will take the handle nut and we are going to feed it through this larger access hole here and manipulate it so that it lies directly over this hole here. And we are going to want to go ahead and do that same thing on the driver side as well. Here in the center of the vehicle, you can see we have got a factory installed tow hook that is going to provide our center attaching point for our trailer hitch. We are going to be using this U bolt here. It will be placed over the top of the tow hook and the hitch will come up and attach to it. Now that we have got our handle nut set up into place, we actually want to go ahead and put our plastic shroud back onto the vehicle. We do want to leave off the two attaching points to the driver side frame rail for the time being. I am also going to just leave these two fasteners here loose for the time being. It is going to give me a little bit more room to work around over here on the driver side. And it will also help me to try and get in to get the heat shield reattached later on. We are going to go ahead and put the hitch up into position now. I am going to start by attaching the hitch by the U bolt here. Putting up the hitch into position is a bit tricky though.

We need to not only go around the shroud here on the driver side, but we need to make sure that the two tangs of the exhaust are above our hitch tube when we are putting it up into place. Otherwise you will not be able to get the exhaust back on when we finish up. You need to kind of hold that up. I am going to go ahead and start tightening up the nuts on the U bolts. I am not going to fully tighten them at this time so we get the bolts into the handle nut and then we can torque them down. You do want to make sure, that when you are tightening onto the U bolt that you tighten it up evenly because we do not want the U bolt sitting crooked. We can go ahead and start ing our hex bolts into our handle nuts. Then with all of our fasteners in place, we can go ahead and start torquing the bolts down. I am going to first torque the bolts here on the bottom of the frame. We will go back and torque the U bolts here at the center attaching point. And now that we have got all of the bolts torqued down, we are going to go ahead and take our handle nuts and we want to flatten those out against the bottom of the frame on both sides. And then next, we are going to go ahead and reinstall the heat shield. We are going to be seating the heat shield up and over the hitch arm that is at the bottom of the frame there. And this will conclude the installation of Draw-Tite hitch part number 24763 on a 2009 Honda Civic.