Curt Custom Fifth Wheel Installation Kit for Chevy/GMC Truck - Carbide Finish

Video Transcript for Curt Custom Fifth Wheel Kit Installation - 2023 Chevrolet Silverado 2500

Hey guys, it's Jake here with etrailer. Today, we're gonna be taking a look at and I'm gonna show you how to install the Curt custom-fit above-rail kit for fifth wheels in a 2023 Chevrolet Silverado 2500. Now, one of the biggest reasons why you would install this kit in the bed of your truck is, first off, you want to tow a fifth wheel trailer but you have a fifth wheel that installs in industry-standard rails. And that's what these are gonna be. They're industry-standard rails. They'll have three different widths of slots that you can slide your fifth wheel down into.

These are great. If you decide to get a new truck, just install these rails and they'll match up to your fifth wheel hitch perfectly. Another reason why you would want to get these over another set that might be custom fit is if you decide you wanna switch out your fifth wheel later on. If you start out with this kit and a fifth wheel that might be more cost effective just to get yourself out on the road, that's perfectly fine. You can do that, and then later on, you can swap to a different fifth wheel head that might be a little bit higher quality, maybe have a couple of different features in it.

You can switch to that and not have to worry about switching your rails. These rails are gonna have a custom-fit design on your truck. You're not gonna have to drill any holes in the frame rails on your truck. You will have to drill 10 9/16-holes in the bed of your truck, but you're gonna have to do that with any set of in-bed rails. They're gonna have a nice, tough, black powder coat finish to help resist rust and corrosion and some scratching when you're loading your truck bed up with stuff.

I like the matte look over the gloss look because I think it blends in a little bit more with the bed of your truck. These are going to help to, the paint job is really tough. Like I said, it's gonna help to resist the scratches from throwing stuff in the bed of your truck. A lot of people don't like these rails because they think it's going to impede them using their truck as they did before. In all reality, they really don't.

Anything that you could throw in here before, you could throw right on top of them and it's not gonna hurt 'em. The only thing I would think that would scratch these would be if you threw a bunch of steel in. Or if you threw any steel accessory back here, that might scratch it. But lumber, piping, any of that kind of stuff, it's not gonna, you don't have to worry about it hurting anything. Now, when it comes to the installation, it's not too bad. The custom-fit design really does help make it simpler. I would still give yourself a couple hours, maybe three or four hours, to get this kit installed, especially if you've never done one before. With the entire kit, installing it, probably the two hardest things are getting that first rail lined up correctly. Measuring from the back of your bed to the rear rail, it's gonna be kind of tedious, not super difficult. And then the other thing is going to be torquing down the hardware that is above the fuel tank. There's two nuts that you're gonna have to torque down above the fuel tank, but we'll show you some tricks to be able to do that a lot easier. With that being said, let's go ahead and get into the installation. You'll want to remove your spare tire before you drill any of your pilot holes, just so that we don't have to worry about puncturing the tire. We need to line up our rear-most rail. We're gonna do this by taking a tape measure, measure from the end of our bed to the front edge of this rail here. Now, we've got a pretty thick bed liner on here, so we're gonna add 1/8 of an inch to the measurement that is depicted in your instructions. Got that side lined up. Gonna measure back and forth. It's not a bad idea to check it if you have to move it at all. And then we're gonna measure from the wheel well to the edge of our rail to make sure that it's centered. Let's scoot it a little bit to the driver. Just go back and forth, keep measuring it to make sure that it's centered. Now, once we get everything measured up correctly, we'll take a paint pen, or you can use a Sharpie too, we'll come in from the third hole in. It's gonna be the one that's sitting on top of this corrugation. We're gonna put a dot right in the center. And the reason why we're marking the center holes is because we're eventually gonna use a punch and punch, essentially put a small dent in the bed so that our drill bit can follow it and go down through. And you're gonna mark the two rear holes, three in, and then you're gonna mark the same one opposing, one here in the center. Do not mark this hole 'cause we will not be putting a bolt there. And then mark these two. Now we're gonna take an 1/8-inch drill bit, drill one pilot hole in one of the holes that we marked, preferably on either side, and then we can go on the side of our truck and be sure that our side plates are mounting up correctly. (drilling) So we have our driver's side bracket. We're gonna lift it up. You want the larger portion that hangs over the frame to be towards the rear of the vehicle. And we can see our little pilot hole up here right at the end of my finger. And our hole for our bracket is right about here. So we'll lift it up, pull it into place. You also wanna make sure it's lining up with this hole in the frame. So line it up, see that our holes are aligning, and we can go ahead and drill out the rest of our pilot holes. (drilling) Now we're gonna take a step bit and drill out our pilot holes to 9/16 of an inch. (drilling) Now you just wanna make sure when you're drilling these out that you have a bolt with you and make sure that you're not drilling out the hole too big. And it's not a bad idea to, you can stick your step bit down in there if your step bit does not have measurements on it, and then take a white marker and mark the step bit so you know when to stop. Now we can clean up our shavings, and we're just gonna use the vacuum, vacuum 'em up, and then we'll use a paint marker to paint the inside bare metal so that we can help resist rust and corrosion. (vacuuming) Now, before we can get our side plates in place, we need to remove this upper heat shield. You'll have four 13-millimeter bolts you'll need to remove, one right here, two on the frame rail that are easier to access from the outside in the wheel well, and then one up on that cross member. Once you get those removed, you can pull this heat shield down and set it to the side. Now we'll fish wire our, we'll reverse fish wire our larger 5/8 bolt through our frame. You'll only have two in your kit and this is what they're for. Take the larger spacer blocks, put 'em on, push our bolt and spacer block through this hole, and then pull it back out. I like to leave the fish wire on so it helps guide it through the hole in the bracket. On the passenger side of the vehicle, which is where we're at, you'll have the two holes here and one hole up here. You'll want this hole to line up with the bolt that we just ran through the bracket. We'll throw our fish wire through there and then stick it in here, set it up on the frame. And we'll take one of our U-bolts and go on the backside of our frame. That's gonna wrap around the frame and come out through the two holes in our bracket. Like that. And then we'll take two of our smaller flange nuts and thread them on loosely. We can take our larger flange nut and thread it on a larger bolt. We're gonna repeat the same process on the other side of the vehicle. Now up top in the bed, we'll slide our rail back in place, put our five bolts in, and then we'll go back underneath the truck where we can put the rest of our hardware on. A little trick that we're doing to help prep us for the next step is we're gonna have to use two different size spacer blocks in order to block up underneath our corrugation, so you have to use one thick one and one thin one. And what I'm doing is I'm using a little bit of red Loctite and essentially gluing them together so that they do not come apart. And we'll let them rest like this for a few minutes. Let 'em dry out. You can see here they stick together nice and good, and that'll help us to slide 'em up in place. Otherwise, if you try to slide 'em up when they're separated, they'll tend to slip and slide around. So this is gonna help us a lot. We're gonna use a variety of spacer blocks in order to protect the corrugation in our bed from being crushed. We're gonna take that skinny spacer and the thicker spacer with the hole cut out of it, and we'll start by sliding one up above our rails. And you just want to slide it to where it's around the bolt like so. We'll do the same for this one and the two on the other side and on the front. Now, up underneath we'll take our square spacer blocks with the square hole in them, slide 'em up over our hardware. If you push the spacer block against the side of the bolt, it tends to help hold it in place while you get your flange nut threaded on. And we can take a 19-millimeter socket and snug up these nuts. For our center bolt on our rear rail, we'll take the thicker bracket, our spacer block with the round hole in it, slide it up in the corrugation, and place another square spacer block on it, and put on your nut. And we'll snug this one up, too. Now to get your front rail installed, what we'll have to do is we'll take the base of our fifth wheel, we're gonna set it in place in our rear rail, and this is how we're going to determine the distance from rail to rail. Let's step on it, slide it in place. There we go. Now we still wanna come back and measure from side to side in the wheel wells to make sure that our rail is centered. We'll do the same as we did on the back and drill out our pilot holes. (drilling) Now the only difference between the front rail and the rear rail is that on the front rail we're gonna use the furthest hole closest to the cab of our vehicle. So on the rear rail, we use this hole; on the front rail, we're using this one. (drilling) And we'll take our paint marker and paint those holes once we get 'em enlarged. We'll take our rail, slide it back over our holes, and put our hardware in place. Before we go underneath our truck and get our hardware assembled on the bottom of the front rail, we'll take our hitch, set it back in place so that everything stays properly aligned. Just like that. Now we can go down and put our hardware on. I'll take our two remain spacer block combos with the the taller one and the shorter one and we're gonna slide 'em up in this corrugation to surround that bolt and equally on the other side. Now, we found that when putting these in, it did help for us to loosen the rear nuts a little bit and give us a little bit more space to slide these up in. They do fit with those snug up, but they're just, it's not as easy to get these in. Now for three forward-most holes, we're going to be using the combination of the rectangle spacer block with the round hole in it and one of these with the square hole. The same combination we did in the center here, we're gonna do that same thing for the three bolts up front. Now, for this bolt that's over above our gas tank, we found it's easier to go from the inside of our wheel well. Gave us a little bit more room. It's still gonna be tricky, but should be able to line it up a little bit better. Now, with everything snugged up underneath, we can come back, torque everything under our truck, and then we'll go to the side rails and torque that last. (torque wrench beeping) Now what we used for the two bolts that are above our gas tank, it's very tight in there. It's kind of hard to get a torque wrench in. We just used this 19-millimeter adapter, put it on our 3/8-torque wrench, and you can slide it in there and be able to torque those two down. It's definitely a good thing to purchase ahead of time from your local auto parts store. Pick one of these up, it's a 19-millimeter, and it'll definitely help you to get those torqued down. With everything torqued down underneath our vehicle, we can come back to our outside bolts on our frame brackets and get those tightened down. (torque wrench beeping) (torque wrench beeping) Well, guys, hopefully this information helped you decide whether or not the Curt above-bed rail kit is right for you and your 2023 Chevy Silverado 2500.