Fifth Wheel Hitch Kit Installation - 1998 Ford F-150 and F-250 Light Duty

Installation of a 5th Wheel Hitch Kit on a 1998 Ford F-150 and F-250 Light Duty

Today on this 1998 Ford F-150 we will be installing the fifth wheel rails and brackets part number 50042-6008. We are up underneath the vehicle and we need to do a couple of things in preparation before we can get started. We first want to lower the spare tire and get that out of the way to give us a little bit more working room. Second we need to go ahead and lower the exhaust off of the rear most hanger here and what we are actually going to do is go ahead and unbolt it from the side of the frame. There is two nuts on the inboard side that we need to go ahead and take off. That will allow that to come down. Then after that we just need to remove the heat shield here as well. You will see that there are four screws that are holding that on that need to come down. We also need to remove the forward heat shield as well. With the under body stuff finished we can go ahead and go up inside of the bed and go ahead and set up our front rail here. 01:17

You want to check the dimension that is listed in the instructions here to insure the proper placement of the front rail. It looks like for short and long bed models both, we are going to be mounting it at 51 3/ 32 inches to the back of the rail here. Then from there we just want to center it in between the wheel wells. Get that in place. And now that we have got the rails centered we can go ahead and center punch our holes. You want to check with the directions again to verify the appropriate holes that you are going to be center punching for. On the front rail we are going to be center punching the outside one here at the front and the second hole here at the rear. Okay and with each one of the holes center punched we can go ahead and take and drill out the holes to 1/ 8 inch. The 1/ 8 inch pilot hole is drilled you can go ahead and set the bracket out of the way. You can go ahead and enlarge these holes to 9/ 16. 02:15

Now that we have got the holes enlarged to 9/ 16 we can go ahead and our carriage bolts into place. Now we will go back underneath the vehicle and install our side brackets. We are over here on the passenger side frame rail, we are going to go ahead and install the passenger side frame bracket first. What I want to do is go ahead and loosely install it to the upper hanger. That is going to attach to the carriage bolts that we just ped down into place. We will take and install the 3/ 4 inch bolt with the flat washer from the inside of the frame out through this hole here. We will be attaching that with the flat washer, lock washer, and nut. Over to the rear portion, see we have got two holes in the frame bracket and that is going to be our attaching point for the exhaust hanger that we removed earlier. For the time being I am not going to attach that. There should be a hole that aligns right here with the frame brackets. On some models it may be a little bit smaller than the 1/ 2 inch that we need it to be so you can enlarge it there. Or on some models like this one, the hole does not actually align so we are going to have to go ahead and drill that out. I am just going to go ahead and mark it here. What you have got to do is hold the bracket up against the bottom of the bed so you know that you are aligned properly. Mark the hole and drill it out and you are going to drill it at 1/ 2 inch. 03:45

Okay then I can reattach the frame bracket and go ahead and put our carriage bolt and block into place there. We will be using the 1 1/ 2 inch carriage bolt and square holed block and attach it with the hex nut. Then we will go ahead and kind of hand tighten each one of those fasteners that we just put in place. We will go over and repeat that procedure for the driver side. Then we will go back up in the bed and drill our holes for our other rail. Now that we have got the frame brackets mounted, we are going to go back inside the bed here and mount our second rail into place. I do want to make note that here on the frame brackets you will see that with the carriage bolts in place you will have a space in between the rail and the corrugation of the bed. What we want to do is put these spacers in place in between there. That will keep the bed from buckling when we tighten the carriage bolts down. Next we want to take the legs from our fifth wheel head assembly. Go ahead and them into the front rail here and we will take and set our second rail into place. With the legs installed we want to make sure that the back rail here is square in between the wheel wells and equidistant from the back of the tailgate as well. 04:52

Once we verify that we want to go ahead and drill out our 1/ 8 inch holes. As our pilot holes we are going to be using the third hole in on the rails on each side. Once we have drilled our 1/ 8 inch holes out we can go back through, pull our rail back out, and enlarge them 9/ 16. We will put our rail back into place, our carriage bolt in, go back down underneath, and put our fasteners on. I do want to note that here with the holes that we have drilled here on the second rail it sits there on the upper portion of the corrugation, we are going to put the spacers in below the bed in between the frame brackets and the bed itself. Below the frame bracket itself we want to place the block and the nut. Okay now that we have got all of the fasteners in place we can go ahead and start torquing our bolts down. We are first going to torque the bolts that are holding the bed rails to the frame brackets and then we will come back through and torque the bolts down on the frame brackets themselves. You want to check with the directions to verify the appropriate torque rating for each individual bolt. That will conclude the installation of the fifth wheel itself. We do need to go ahead and remount the exhaust bracket over here onto the two studs that we talked about earlier. Then we just want to reinstall our heat shields, put our spare tire back up into place, and our installation will be completed. That will conclude the installation of the fifth wheel rails and brackets part number 50042-6008.