Trailer Hitch Installation - 2007 Mini Cooper S Series

Installation of a Trailer Hitch on a 2007 Mini Cooper S Series

Today on this 2007 Mini Cooper S, we are going to install part number 11130 from Curt. The first thing we need to do is go ahead and remove the bumper cover itself. And it is going to require removing about 11 fasteners. And they are in all different spots so we will do them one at a time so you can see what is going on. We will start with three of them on the bottom. First off, we will start with this one that is close to the tail pipes. And then there is one on the inside of the fender well here and on the other side here. Next we will remove the same type of fasteners as the last two. And there is one on the inside of the fender well right here by this reflector. It is going to be at kind of an odd angle to get to. Kind of go from the inside out. And there is going to be another one just like this on the other side of the vehicle. Right now we are on the passenger side. Next we have to peel back this fender liner here and we will have another fastener where these two panels meet. It is more like a rivet so just kind of take your screw driver and spread it apart. And use a trim panel tool to get the rest of it out. 1:07

The next thing that we need to do is disconnect this running light right here. And we are going to push this little button down and it comes apart. And then we will take our fender flare free and we will get it free from the bumper too. Now push in with the bumper and pull out with the fender flare. And it has some pretty heavy duty snaps in there, so it will take a little bit to pull apart. And again, we are going to do this on both sides of the vehicle. Alright, at this point we can go ahead and disconnect the back up sensors if your vehicle has them. And you just push on this little tab on the side here. The last two fasteners are behind the hatch here. So we will open up the hatch. There is one fastener here and one here on the other side. Take those two free and the bumper cover should come right off. And there is a little center tab that holds the bumper cover in place. What you want to do is kind of reach behind it and pull up and back and it unpops. The next thing we are going to do is disconnect the actual bumper structure itself and the bumper brackets that go to the body of the vehicle. And before we do that, we are going to just simply disconnect the plastic connections from the wire harness to the bumper bracket to get it out of the way so we do not mess it up. To remove the bumper structure and the bumper brackets, we will remove these four bolts right here. We are looking at the driver side now. It is going to be the same thing back on the passenger side. We will also take these wires out from the sensors. We will just pull them up and out of the way too. We will just leave our last two bolts loose and we will get an extra set of hands to take off the bumper structure. 2:50

Alright, now we are just going to go ahead and hold the hitch up into place and show you where it goes. And right now it is resting on the heat shield for the exhaust but that is okay. We will take care of that later. The next thing we are going to do is set up our bumper structure as it would be sitting on the vehicle. And then we are going to test fit our hitch to the back side of it. Now, if you notice, the foam is in the way so we have to cut that a little bit and trim it as needed to make it fit inside there. What we are going to do is trim up this section right here. And actually we are going to go all of the way down to this open part right here and make a square notch so it gives us plenty of working room. We have the outside edges done. Now we have to work on this center section here. We already cut it out of course. Just using a sharp knife we made scoring cuts all of the way across and then kind of cut at an angle to get to the bottom half of it. So this will give you an idea about how much we had to take out. Probably about 3/4 inches of material and about 2/3 of the way down of this bump right here. A couple of test fits to make sure, to fine tune it. Then we can go ahead and put it back on the vehicle. We are going to reattach the hitch and the bumper structure using the factory bolts. And we are going to use a conical tooth washer that came with the kit. It is just going to sit like so. And we are going to run it through the bumper structure and then through the hitch and then we will run the rest of this back into the body of the vehicle. These are the bolt holes right here that we are going to use to reattach the hitch and the bumper structure too. It is the same on both sides. Alright, we will go ahead and reattach the hitch and the bumper structure back to the vehicle. We have two bolts holding everything together now. Let us go ahead and install the rest of the bolts. 4:31

You will notice the bottom edge of the bumper structure gets right next to the edge of the top of the receiver tube itself. So what we are going to do is install the ball mount and just make sure we have plenty of room. Alright, once we have all of the bolts snugged down, you can go ahead and torque them down as specified in the instructions. Alright, now we can go ahead and reroute the wire back to where it was originally. And they were just behind the foam here. So let us go ahead and just push it out of our way, put it into the slots. These connectors were sitting up here, not being used. So we will just leave those lie up here. And then our plastic holder we will just push back into the bumper cover. What we are going to do next is go ahead and create room for our hitch and our heat shield. Now this one we had barely enough room. It was not really touching so it is not a big deal. If you need more room, we will just create a divet in the heat shield and we will just use the hitch to make that. We will just go ahead and push up the heat shield and then push it back down. That creates a nice dent in the heat shield that matches it so set it up to where you have about 1/4 inch away is fine. We will go ahead and test fit the bumper cover and we will check the distance between the hitch and the actual bumper cover itself. It will give us a good idea where everything is going to set up at. Now take a look underneath and see how much room we have. Alright, right here you can see the bottom of the hitch and you can see the bumper cover. And there is about 1-1/2 inches in between the two. So that gives an idea of what we are looking at here. So we will go to the front side and line ourselves up. You can tell we need to take out this section. Put it on something soft so we do not scratch up the paint. And what we are going to do is remove the center section right here. And then we will start doing our cutting for our opening. And to do that, apply pressure to this edge right here and push this in. And it comes apart. We will do that all of the way around. 6:20

Once you get the one side loosened, the other side is actually pretty easy. Just push against the color part and pull up a little bit. It comes right out. We will go ahead and figure out where we are going to make our marks. And if you look at this row right here, it is actually at 1-1/4 inches. That makes it good for use. So basically on these outside edges right here we will stop right there. And we just need to figure out our height, which again is going to be 1-1/4 inches. so it looks like it is going to be to this edge right here. Go ahead and take out that section right there and we should be good to go. It always helps to go a little bit oversize because the hitch can be off a little bit and the body components could be off a little bit too. What we are going to do next is put the section back in temporarily. Push it in just enough to hold it. And then we will test fit our opening with the hitch by putting the bumper cover back on and then make any adjustments after that. And actually, so far so good. However, the hitch will move around in there a little bit so make sure you have plenty of room for that too. But yeah, it looks like we did pretty good. So basically we will fully install the back into the bumper cover and we will start reassembling the bumper cover onto the vehicle. will all of our fasteners installed and we made sure that the bumper cover is straight our install is complete. And there you have it for part number 11130 from Curt.