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Today on this 2006 Dodge Ram 2500 Heavy Duty we are going to install part number 9462-35 from Draw-Tite. All right, we are underneath the bed of the truck right now. First step is to pull the exhaust out of the way. We will go ahead and remove this rubber hanger here, theres one here, and a couple on the muffler in the back itself. Sometimes they have these little clips on here, so what you want to do is take a pair of pliers and just kinda work them off. Then you can take the rubber hanger off. :25
I pulled the exhaust out of the way a little bit so now I have more working room. Before we install the rails what you want to do is take some time and just thread the nuts on for a second and make sure they thread on. A lot of times they will powder coat the threads, and it is a real bear to get the nut installed and tightened down, so you might want to run a nut where it is easier to get to. All right we will sneak our rails in from underneath. The rails are identical, however you want to make sure that this rail here, the lower part with the bolt stays towards the back of the tail gate. Likewise with the part going on the other rail, this part has to face the cab so the hitch can fit inside. 1:24
And then the carriage bolts will simply into the square holes in the crossbar. We will take this bar and pull it straight to the back. We will install our front crossbar now. Drop our bolts in here. And we will just put them just like that for now. Then we will go ahead and put our side plates onto the cross bars next. All right this is a side plate we are going to install on the side of the frame, and you can tell it has a variety of holes in it and kind of looks like swiss cheese. What it is is this bolt hole here and here are going to be used for u-bolts that clamp on, and this hole here and this hole outside here is going to be used for the frame brackets themselves and there is another set of holes for the u-bolts also. All right, we will install our hardware on loosely because we still need to install one more bolt onto the frame. So I need to be able to move the bracket around a little bit. All right we will go ahead and start installing our hardware going from inside the frame and coming out of this hole on the bracket right here. We will take our bolt leader, put it through the hole, then work our way out this access hole here. There is one on the side that might be easier. Get the mud out of the way. Slide the block in first, then we will thread in our bolt, and pull the whole assembly through. 3:20
All right lets go ahead and install our hardware, conical tooth washer and the nut. And again we will just loosely thread those into place too. Okay we will go ahead and install our u-bolts next. This is the easy side here, and just line them up and push them into place. This is the passenger side we are looking at. Align with the bottom one, and then push that one out of the top. We will go ahead and install our hardware for the u-bolts, the conical tooth washer and the nut. Again we are going to leave everything loose for now. Now we will move over to the other side. All right we are going to install the u-bolt on the drivers side now, and the wire harness is going to be in the way as well as the brake line. We can not do anything with the brake line so we will have to warp the u-bolt behind it. So we will start by taking off the harness here, just moving out of our way. Slip our u-bolt here first, and that is why you leave the plates loose so you can slip your u-bolts in there. Once again we will go ahead and install the washers and nuts for the u-bolt. One neat little note here, you are able to pull these out without breaking the little plastic stubs, once you are done with it you can push it right back into place. We will go ahead and mark out the location for our hole that we will drill through the bed of the truck. There are two different dimensions for a long bed and short bed, so make sure you go by what is specified in the instructions. What we will do next is go ahead and just punch it, and then we will actually compare it from the bottom to the head assembly just to verify we have it in the right spot. We pound our mark right here in the bottom of the bed. It is offset towards the front rail which is good because if you check the instructions it will be offset to the front of the vehicle so we are in good shape there. Now lets go ahead and drill out our 1/ 4 inch hole and follow it up with the hole saw to make an opening for the hitch itself. 5:29
What we did was snug down the side brackets to the frame cross members themselves and the brackets are still loose on the frame. We tightened them enough to hold the cross members up at a right angle so it is easier to put up the head assembly. Once we have that loosely installed we can go ahead and loosen the brackets and make any adjustments that are necessary. All that remains now is to snug this up a little bit, center with the hole in the bed. Go ahead and take the ball, put it in loosely. Just go ahead and center the ball, you can probably push it with your foot or maybe take a rubber mallet and tap it over as you need. When you are satisfied with the way it is sitting we will go ahead and tighten the bolt that attaches the hitch to t he cross members and go from there. Go ahead and start snugging down all the bolts in the frame bracket, we will start with the bolts that go to the cross member and the frame bracket. Then we will go to the u-bolts, and both sides of the u-bolt. And then we will go ahead and torque everything down as specified in the instructions. Now that we have all our bolts torqued down we can install the handle, line up the holes and the cotter pin. Next we will mark and drill for the u-bolts themselves. What is going to happen is you want the u-bolts to sit inside the trough so when it is sitting down it fits in the low part of the corrugation. So, we feel over to one side, the closest to the hitch ball itself, you can see and fell the trough come down. See what I do with the u-bolt. So that is the part we want to go ahead and drill out. We are going to use a 1 /2 inch drill bit just to mark it. Go up to the 1 /4 inch bit, it will make a nice clean hole going back down with the 1/ 2 inch bit or 9/ 16ths if you need to. If you notice, one of the u-bolts has a shorter leg than the other, what that does is give it a little bit of extra clearance, to say for instance the gas tank was in the way or the exhaust like one this side is pretty close. We will actually just put the short one towards the exhaust to get more room. We will go ahead and install the springs, washers, and nuts from underneath. We are going to install our washer first, then the spring, and then the nut. We can only go so far because it is a lock nut, only two or three threads at the most. When you tighten them down you only want 2 to 3 nuts showing past the nut at all. Go ahead and put our exhaust hangers up now. That will finish the install of part number 9462-35 room Draw-Tite.
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