Fifth Wheel Hitch Installation - 2005 Ford F-250 and F-350 Super Duty

Installation of a 5th Wheel Hitch on a 2005 Ford F-250 and F-350 Super Duty

Today on this 2005 Ford F-350 Super Duty we are going to install part number 30847-30073 from Reese. There are two ways to get the rails underneath the bed of the truck. What we are going to do is in this case we are going to actually loosen the bed bolts up and pushing that up we will have access. If you can not get the bolts loose then the next best thing you can do is put two cuts into the sheet metal underneath the bed and pry it up out of the way so you can slide the rails in. If we were to cut the bed what we would do is just make a notch here and a notch here and then we just take some vise- grips or some pliers and just pull the sheet metal up and out of our way. Then we can slide the cross member in. Okay we put some spacers between the frame and the bed of the truck just to give us a little extra working room. 00:47

One thing you might want to do before you install the rails is take your tap bolt and actually run it through the threads once or twice because what happens is that inside the threads it gets paint in there and what you may want to do is just go ahead and save yourself some grief later and run the bolt through now just to clean it out. All right when we install the rails just make sure that you have the oval pointing up so the puck can go in from the top side down. Okay we have got our first rail in and you need to push it forward. There is a little breather tube here that we have got to take down and out of the way and we will just work it forward. Okay and I will go ahead and do the second one but it is going to stay pretty much in the same place. 01:33

All right we can go ahead and install our side brackets now. We are going to bolt those right to the cross members. We are going to line up with this hole here. Basically what happens is with the instructions is that this plate is going to actually butt up against the side of this hat channel right here. So what we can do pretty much right now is go ahead and lower the bed of our truck and then secure our bracket back to the hat channel. At this point we can go ahead and snug up the bolts too. We will go ahead and repeat the same process back over on the driver side. At this point we can go ahead and re-tighten the bed bolts. Okay next we will go ahead and install our hardware in the hole going towards the back of the vehicle. We are just going to go ahead and install our bolt and flat washer and on the back side we will install the lock washer, block, and nut. What we will do next is go ahead and snug it down that way we can use the hitch bracket as a temp plate and will not move around while we drill out our forward holes. Then we will follow up with our next sized bit as stated in the instructions. Now that we have got our hole drilled out on the passenger side here, on most applications you will just simply put in another nut and bolt and block assembly on there but in this case the shock mount is right behind here. You will have to use a special neuro bolt that comes with the kit. What we are going to do is fish wire it from the back side out this way. 03:15

The kit does come with a fish wire tool. Just push it through and kind of out the back and down and out to the side. We will thread our bolt in and maneuver it back into position and pull it through. We will leave that in there for now and we will get the rest of our hardware and put that into place. Put on our flat washer, lock washer, and then the nut. When we tighten this down this bolt will actually draw itself into the frame of the vehicle. The thread should be just about at the end of the nut. We will go ahead back to the other side on the driver side it will actually be just a conventional lock and lock washer, washer, plate, and nut. The last hole, what we are going to do is going to be the same as the first two we did. Going back to the driver side, put our flat washer and bolt through and then our plate, lock washer, and the nut. The next step is to go ahead and lock our holes in the bed so we can drill down to make room for the puck. We are going to do that with the marking bolt that is supplied with the kit. We will just run it up until we make a mark in the bed. When you get it running up into place take a moment to make sure you can see the mark on the top side and then move on to the next one. All right we have got our holes marked. What we are going to next is go ahead and loosen these bolts here, move the cross bars out of the way so we have room to drill right through the bed. Move those out of the way as needed for clearance. 05:05

Here is our mark we made in the bed. We actually made it a little bigger than normal just to see it easier and basically what you want to do is just take a simple punch and just kind of round out the hole a little bit just to make sure it is straight and then we can go ahead and use that to start our pilot hole. Now we will do the same thing with the rest of the holes. All right we can go ahead put our cross members and put those back into place. All right at this point we can go ahead and start installing the pucks. Basically what is going to happen is you are going to take the puck, put the beauty ring around it, just go ahead and it into place, and then take your button head bolt and just go ahead and get it started. It helps to get the washer in there first and then start the bolt. You can go ahead and tighten it down and then just go ahead and torque it down as specified in the instructions. Once you get the pucks tightened down, go ahead and get the fifth wheel out and our unit is a pre-assembled unit so what we are going to do is go ahead and give it a test fit to see how it fits. Okay sometimes on these assemblies here what happens is that this part will be off set from the puck itself. The way to fix that is there is a jam nut inside of here which the fifth wheel actually comes with a tool to fix that. Also you want to go around and tighten all of these too because the factory ones will not tighten down actually. So you want to push the pin assembly all the way through and sneak your wrench in there and then tighten it down or loosen it as you see fit. See how you can move it back and forth. You may need just that little bit of play to fit it in just right. So you are going to have to do a couple of test fits, put the fifth wheel into place, check it out and see which one binds up, loosen it up, adjust it, and put it back into place. All right when you tighten these up you want to go snug, you want to go about 1/ 4 of a turn. All right once you have the nuts tightened down, lock them into place using these three little tabs and this retaining washer here and what you want to do is flip up the tab that matches the flat side that of the nut valve. It might be the front one, it might be the rear one. Okay that one is locked into position and then just go ahead and do the same thing for the other three. All right once you have it fully adjusted the hitch should slide in, you may have a little bit of friction you may have to push in a little bit but that is good. When you are all said and done you will have a little tiny bit of movement but you should not have hardly anything at all. All right while we are up here we will go ahead and install the handle assembly. It simply slides into place, two bolts in, the lock washer and nut on the bottom, and tighten it down. Okay now we can go ahead and torque these bolts down. With that, that finishes our install of part number 30847-30073.