Video Transcript for Curt Custom Fifth Wheel Kit Installation - 2017 Toyota Tundra

Hey, neighbors, Kevin here at etrailer. And today we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install the CURT custom fifth wheel installation kit here on our 2017 Toyota Tundra. Now Tundras typically aren't gonna be our recommended choice when it comes to tilling the fifth wheel trailer just because their capacities typically are a bit lacking compared to some other options out on the market. But that being said, you still can do it as long as you're making sure that your trailer is within that capacity of your truck. And if that is the case, then, typically, you're probably gonna have a short bed. So you're gonna want to switch over to some base rails so that way you can use a rotating pin box to gain a little bit of extra turning clearance so that the nose of your trailer doesn't end up contacting the cab of the truck.

Now with this base rail kit, there are gonna be some fitment issues depending on model to model. One of the biggest ones is with it being a CrewMax. If you do have that, you would not be able to install that because this is gonna change where everything is located on the frame, and then your brackets aren't gonna line up properly with the bed. So you would not be able to use this if you had a CrewMax. Now there we inchesre some other issues that CURT lines out in the instructions themselves.

One of them being a control box, which is located right around this area on our driver's side. And we ended up not even having to move that. They give you a relocation bracket for that if that is an issue for you. But in our case, it honestly was not in the way at all. We didn't have to do anything with it.

I took it off initially 'cause I was just following the instructions, but we ended up just putting it back exactly how it was. Now there we inchesre some other fitment issues just because with the way things lined up under the bed, we had hat channels in the way, we had a cross member in the way. If you look right here, we did have to swap out our hardware. This is all grade 8 hardware that we have here. And typically, you're gonna have carriage bolts that are running from the base rails down into those frame brackets.

But instead, we had to switch over to some hex bolts, same grade and everything like that. We just wanted to switch to something to where we could get it, get a wrench on it because down below this, there's a cross member that completely blocks any kind of wrench from getting into there. We weren't even able to use a crow's foot on it. So if you do end up having to do that, make sure that you're getting the correct 1/2 inch by 13 thread grade 8 bolts. That way, you know, that it's nice and safe. It's gonna be able to stand up to that weight of that trailer hitch pulling on it. Along with that, just going over some of the specs on this, this is gonna be a carbide finish, both on the rails and then down on the brackets. You're gonna have that powder-coated finish so that way you don't have to worry about these rusting out and looking like crap in your bed. But that being said, doesn't hurt to throw a tonneau cover on and make sure that these aren't getting rained on. You know, overtime, exposure is eventually gonna wear into these, but these are made to last for quite a while. Another thing that people typically are gonna have an issue with is with these base rails being in here, now we're losing some of our bed space, and it's not something that we can easily just take out. From the bottom of our bed up, we're looking at right around 1 inch, 1 1/4 inch here in height. So, I mean, typically, with these base rails, a lot of 'em are getting pretty slim compared to how it used to be in the past. where you'd see like 2, 2 1/2 inches in height here, which adds up to a lot, which you can throw up your hitch height, depending on which hitch you have. So this being down a little bit more compact is pretty nice. Along with that, these are gonna be ISR, so that's why there's these extra slots here. So if you ever wanted to swap out your fifth wheel hitch, maybe you wanted to upgrade to something a little bit heavier, not in this case since it's a Tundra. But if that was the case with a different truck, these base rails would be able to handle that because they have an ISR footprint here. So that's gonna be the 22 inches from the center of one rail back to the other. And then the separation here between the different hitches is just that spacing for the width itself. Now with all that being said, we can talk about the installation here. I did say that we had a lot of difficulties with a few different things, and CURT even mentioned some of those. This is one where I probably wouldn't do it myself if I did not have all of the specialty tools that we used here today. So we ended up using a crow's foot. There's a couple of variations of that that we've used just because we needed a further out extension from that so that we can actually get into the tight spaces to get all of these bolts torque down. The frame brackets themselves weren't too bad. Getting that into place really isn't that hard. You do have to loosen up your hitch, and you can pivot it back and have the brackets kind of slide up so that way you can get the frame brackets into place. So those ones not too challenging exactly what I'd expect from a base rail install, but just with how tight the clearances were for these carriage bolts up for the base rails into the frame brackets. It's something that I probably wouldn't recommend doing at home. I definitely recommend using our dealer locator, entering in your ZIP code, and finding a shop to get it professionally installed to save yourself all of the hassle. Now if you are the installer that's gonna have to do this, please stick around and you can see how we did it so you can get some tips and tricks on how to get it done yourself. So starting off our install, first step's gonna be removing our spare tire so that way we have some room to work. Once you have that done, we're gonna be taking our side plate for the front on the passenger's side. So it's gonna be this guy right here, where it's nice and long up front, it's just got that square piece up top with the rectangle portion, more than the slotted portion, facing towards the front of the vehicle. And what they want you to do is hold this up and we're gonna find the hole, which is this guy right here, and we're gonna enlarge that. Now when I went to pull this up, it's not really sitting how I would like it to. So we're gonna skip some of these instructions and just double-check that we are getting exactly how we want it to by drilling our holes up in the bed with the base rails first. So as you can see, like for me to get this lined up with this other hole where it's supposed to be really isn't giving us a straight shot at that bolt hole. So might be that the hat channel is in our way. We might have to cut a little section of that out just to make that work. This could just be a year model issue instead of a overall issue. So we're gonna start by going up in and drilling down those four holes for our base rail. That way we can line it up and make sure that this is actually where we wanted to sit. So like I said, we are gonna skip over the frame rail brackets and start drilling our holes for the base rails so that way we can line up with the holes down there. So we're making sure we're putting our frame bracket in the right spot, especially since we're gonna be drilling through the frame. So for this part, we're gonna start with the cab side, which is a little unusual. Typically, we're going for the tailgate side first, but the instructions are gonna call for 49 3/8 spacing from the end of our bed here. But since we have a spray-in liner, that's gonna add about 1/16 inch onto our length here that we're going over, 'cause this goes over the lip of the bed. So I'm gonna add 1/16 on. So we're right at 49 7/16. And I've not only measured from this side, I come back over measured from this side. Make sure that you have this perfectly even both ways. And then I've also gone ahead and I'm gonna check from the wheel well over to it. And looking at this right now, looks like we're right at 3 1/2, a little bit off here, but it's kind of hard to tell with your wheel well. There we go. You gotta make sure you're hitting at the same exact spot because it curves up. So I'm getting 3 1/2 right there as well. So we know we're good front to back and side to side. We got this perfectly lined up. So our next step is gonna be taking a center punch. And we're gonna do the outer four holes with our center punch and then we'll just drill a little 1/8 inch pilot hole down so that way we can see where we need to be. (metal clacking) Now we have this set in place, we can use our center punch. And for the cab side here, we're gonna be using the second slot in. So we'll want that for both sides. So we can get that centered. (metal clacking) Run our punch. (metal clacking) Since it's so hard to see my center punch hole when I move this outta the way. Instead, I'm gonna be paint-markering it first. That way we can actually see what we're doing. We'll get our base rail out of the way. We've got our spots here. I'm gonna hit those one more time with my center punch (metal clacking) just because this is a really textured pattern. (metal clacking) (metal clacking) (metal clacking) And then we will take our 1/8 inch drill bit and we will do a little pilot hole here. (drill whirring) (drill whirring) All right, so we're back under, looking on our passenger's side frame rail. Trying to line up our bracket, lines up pretty well with the front hole, but this hole closer to our tailgate is a little bit blocked just because we have a hat channel on the way. So what I'm gonna do is just notch out just a small section here so that our bracket can sit over it because we're gonna have a spacer that's under it, plus one on top of it between that and the bed. (drill whirring) (drill whirring) (metal clacking) There we go. That looks a lot better. All right, now we've drilled out those holes to show where our base rail's gonna come through. This is lining up with the hat channel edge, just kind of trimmed out. So we can get to actually drilling through the frame rail now and run our bolt through our frame rail mounting brackets so that we can move on to get these base rails attached. Now that we've confirmed this is the correct hole, and it's exactly how we need it. I'm going to step this up to a 5/8 hole. So right now, I've got a 7/16, so I'm just gonna work my way up to it. That way we're not really having to sit here and drill forever. (drill whirring) Now we have that hole enlarged over on our passenger's side, the next step is going to be removing this control box right here. And to do so, on the backside, there's gonna be a nut, and that's gonna require a 12 millimeter socket. So we'll pop that off. And we're gonna be reinstalling this again with just with a bracket that's included with the kit just to get it spaced further away. (ratchet cranking) And slide this out. It's a little rusty. So not really one to come outta the bracket here. (metal clacking) There we go. Now that we got access to that back one, I'm gonna get that one off as well, and then we'll pull this whole bracket off 'cause it's gonna be this black bracket on the back is gonna be separate from these two guys. And then once we have our frame bracket up on here, the new bracket that we have, which is this guy right here, this little Z-shaped bracket is gonna mount up with the hardware that clamps the bracket to the frame rail. (ratchet cranking) All right, so they had us remove that electrical connector and then put the bracket in. Bracket's nowhere near it. There's no way for me to get that electrical control box over to where they're saying to mount it with this bracket, but it's honestly right out of our way. So I think I'm just gonna it back with those factory nuts, and then we'll just skip this part for now. If we do run into an issue later on, we'll probably to just fabricate something to make it work. I'm seeing a lot of inconsistencies with the instructions versus what we're actually seeing with the vehicles. This might actually just be a trim package issue, but if you're gonna put it for, you know, each model it should really match up. And in this case, I'm just not really seeing that too well. So we're gonna keep chugging along now. I marked out my hole 'cause this bracket is going to line up with the hole inside there, and I was just under the truck. And I could see that my holes were matching up from the bed. So I just marked this out. We'll center punch that and then drill that out 'cause it's also gonna need to allow for a 5/8 bolt to go through. So I've hit it with the center punch. Now I'm going with my eighth inch drill bit, and I'm just gonna work my way up all the way to 5/8 (drill whirring) (drill whirring) So we just drove that hole down on the frame rail on our driver's side. Now they want you to come back up into the bed and we're gonna enlarge our holes that we have. So the two on this side and the two on the passenger's side as well. For our base rails, we wanted to get that up to 9/16. So I'm gonna be going, skipping around through the bits just so I get up to that 9/16 just to make it easier. So each way, we're just only chipping out just a little bit each time. (drill whirring) (drill whirring) (drill whirring) So once you have that cut out, you'll wanna come back and just file and keep vacuuming, kinda make sure you got this all nice and cleaned up. No burrs. It'll potentially hang up on your hardware. (metal screeching) I think we're good on this side. (vacuum cleaner whirring) And then once you are ready, we're gonna put some clear coat on here. That's gonna help protect that bare metal from us drilling. So now we're gonna drop in our carriage bolts along with our U-shaped spacers. We're gonna slide that right into place. And we will use our carriage bolts to make sure that we are installing our frame brackets right where they need to be. (metal clacking) All right, with that in place now we can go back down under the vehicle. All right, I'm on the driver's side right now. If you don't really have enough room, you might need to pull those carriage bolts just back up before you get the plate in, but we're gonna try and get it with it down already. When you hold it, hold it like this, and we're gonna slot it in, and then turn it to get this in place. There's a lot of other stuff in the way here. (metal clacking) Yeah, so I'm hitting my the bolt and then you can just pop it up just a bit. (metal clacking) There we go. Get some wiring here, we'll work around. (metal clacking) All right now we're gonna be using our larger hex bolts. We're gonna throw a flat washer on it, and we're gonna slot that through, get that lined up with the side. That way it'll help hold it in place so that way when we can go under fully, and put on the nuts and plates that go on the vertical bolts. We won't have any issues. Same thing with this. A second one of these with a flat washer on the other side, we're gonna be using these offset spacers. So it's these guys right here with the square bit, a little bit further out. It's not just centered on there. These will slot right on there and then we'll have flange nuts, sorry, larger flange nuts that'll go on those bolts. And that's gonna be on the inside of our frame rail 'cause our frame rail is a C-channel. So I'm gonna wait and we'll lift it back up. We'll get under there so we can see everything and get everything tightened down. Now for our side bolts, the horizontal one's going through the frame rail, we're gonna be throwing on these offset spacers. (metal clacking) That one in, that one in. (metal clacking) And these are gonna clamp onto it as we tighten it down with those flange nuts. Not sure what the larger ones. (metal clacking) I get that started. And then I'm gonna tighten and torque this down to the specifications listed in the instructions manual. It's gonna be just a little bit too hard to see just 'cause I'm gonna have to be right in the way of the camera here just once we get to that point. (metal clacking) And since these aren't carriage bolts on the side, you will have to have a wrench holding the head of it. Otherwise, it's gonna keep spinning like it's doing to you right now. (Kevin panting) (torque wrench beeping) All right, so now we're gonna do the same process over on the passenger's side as well with our front bracket on the cab side here. And it's gonna be just those offset spacers again along with a flange nut. Now this top one up here is gonna be a nightmare. There's not really any room to get in there, and we've got a bunch of other stuff in the way. I might need to trim out this rail just slightly just to get this on. But this is the factory hole, I do believe, so it's not like it was something that we chose. (metal clacking) There we go. We lucked out. It does actually work. But getting a socket on here, probably not gonna be the same. All right, we lucked out. We don't have to actually do anything special. We used a chrome socket and we just barely fit in place there. So I'm gonna get my torque wrench set up and we will get these torqued down. We tried, I mean, it was super tough to try and get it from the inside so I did end up having to come towards the outside. We had a wrench with a 15/16 socket on the nut and then we torqued it from the bolt head side just because it was just impossible trying to get our torque wrench in there. So you might have to do the same at home, depending on how much space you got there. So we did have to make some changes on the bolts on the tailgate side. So I've already got this one dropped in. We're gonna be doing the same thing over on the other side as well on the passengers. So the carriage bolts that they give you, unfortunately, come out in a spot where there's no way to get a wrench onto the nut at all just because it's so tight in the frame with a hat channel right there. So there's no way to torque it down from the nut side. And with it being a carriage bolt there's no way to get it from the top. So we switched over to some hex head bolts. These are two inches, 1/2 inch by, or grade 8, sorry. And we are dropping those in. And we're gonna use that flange bolt 'cause I can get a pair of pliers on it. And then since it is a flange bolt with some teeth on it, it is gonna start to bite into that spacer that we have down on the bottom and we will be able to torque it from the top. Now, that's typically not what we wanna do. But in this case, this isn't gonna be the only way to safely torque these down. So you may find that if you have that same issue, if you get down there and find that you just can't get your hands or any kind of tool on that nut just 'cause of the spacing there. Then switch over, make sure you go to your hardware store, you wanna get grade 8 bolts. And like I said, 1/2 inch by 2 inches. (drill whirring) All right. Now we've struggled through. I've had a couple of assistants help me 'cause we needed a second person up in the bed to work on the bolt because we had just enough room to get the nut up in place and then have the bolt start to go down into it, and it needed to thread all the way in. Otherwise, it's not gonna fit if you just hammer the bolt in and then try to get the nut on. So definitely a huge challenge. But now that we have it and the teeth on our flange nut or biting. I'm gonna torque this down to the specs that are listed in the last step of the instruction manual. (torque wrench cranking) (torque wrench beeping) Now we have the two or the tailgate side torqued down, I'm gonna get back under the vehicle and then we will do the cab side here. And then once those are in place, we can switch to our back brackets. (torque wrench cranking) (torque wrench beeping) (metal clacking) (torque wrench cranking) (torque wrench beeping) So it was really tight on the backside here. We ended up using an 18 inch extension with a 3/4 inch deep well socket so that we can get onto both bolts here. But we've got 'em both torqued. So now we can move onto those rear brackets. For our rear bracket, we are gonna have to remove the bolts holding in our hitch. Now this might not be for every single model. They do make a note of that. Unfortunately on ours, we are gonna have to pop out this bolt, this bolt, these three bolts here, and we are gonna pivot the hitch on this back bolt. So I would loosen that up just a bit too so you got a little bit of wiggle room. That way it's not pinched up against the frame here. But we're gonna pop those five bolts out. And we'll do the same thing over on the driver's side. Now if you have anything that's gonna be super tight, I would probably loosen that up. So like they had air lines ran right here, but it was real tight so I didn't wanna risk that kind of pulling on that. So I did cut the zip ties off and I'll replace those later. But it looks like we're pretty much good on the wiring and stuff. There's enough slack in that. I could probably be fine just with the pivot motion that we're gonna do. So I'm gonna get these taken off and we'll get to the next part here. (ratchet cranking) (metal clacking) Now I am gonna have my lovely assistant, Sam, push up on the bumper and hitch here, and that's gonna drop down that bracket over there so that we can slide this into place. Definitely gonna take a little bit of maneuvering to really get it how you need. (metal clacking) There we go. And it's kind of pinched on that. While that's up, I'm gonna get the other side and we're just gonna do the same exact thing. (metal clacking) All right, now with that back in place, we can lift this back up, and we're gonna use that factory hardware 'cause we got weld nuts on the inside of the frame. So once we push this back up, it'll sandwich in between the hitch and the frame rails. Now you might have to use the pry bar. I just stuck the pry bar inside 'cause we have a rounded one, this guy right here. And what I did was tried to move it around, kind of just jingle it back and forth so that way we can get that hole perfectly lined up. I would probably start with your front ones here when you're putting on the trailer hitch, and then go to those three rear ones later. That way you know you got this all set before you go and try and tighten it up. (metal clacking) (ratchet cranking) Now have our frame brackets in place, we need to figure out how to or what spot to drill through on the base rail so we can get that mounted up to our brackets. And the easiest way to do that is drop in your fifth wheel hitch. If you already have it there, that's gonna give you that perfect measurement because we are gonna match right up with our feet. If you take a tape measure, you should be getting 22 inches from the center of the tailgate rail to the center of our cab rail. And then we'll want to just double-check. Now it should be pretty good just because we have the hitch in place, but never hurts to double-check just the side, just side. So it looks like we're right at 3 9/16. Here, about 3 3/8. So I do need to kinda tap this over just a bit and get this lined up properly. 22. All right, now that that's all good, we are going to be switching to a different hold this time. So instead of the second hole in, we're gonna be going to the third hole in. I'm gonna mark that just because I'll have to get this out of the way so I can drill. And then we're gonna work our way up. I'm gonna start out with 1/8 inch drill bit, then we'll go down below. Just double-check, make sure that we're lining up with our frame bracket. And then we can start going a little bit bigger, working our way up to 9/16. (drill whirring) (drill whirring) (drill whirring) So now we're gonna be doing the same process. We're gonna have our U-shaped spacer and then our carriage bolts. (metal clacking) Now our U-spacers will go onto the bed between our bracket and the bed, so the rib portion of our bed right here. And that's gonna prevent any crushing. Our square spacer is going to go underneath the bracket. And that's gonna be followed up by our flange nut. Wouldn't help hurt to have an extra hand up top just pressing down on that carriage bolt 'cause each time I try to do it, it's fighting me. But if you can also try pulling on the spacer. So my camera guy, Tom, here is a genius. And I thought of that as well. Help pull it back, just get it started, and then we'll move on to our next one. (metal clacking) (metal clacking) So in the passenger's side, there will be a wire harness in the way. If you pry up on the push pins that are holding it in, you can get yourself a little bit more space to work with. (metal clacking) (metal clacking) All right, so I'm snugging these up right now and just trying to kind of get an idea of how we're gonna approach torquing these down. For this one out to the tailgate here has a bunch of stuff in the way. That's probably gonna end up having to be a crow's foot. And we'll come in from here and crank away at it 'cause I can't get a socket on it just 'cause this cross member here is blocking us. And on the other side, I do have a tiny bit more room. Maybe I can switch over to a short well and sneak it in. But we'll have to try that out. The backside of it closer to the cab. Those ones are perfect. I could easily get right into 'em and tighten 'em down. All right, so I was able to get a crow's foot on both front ones here by the tailgate side. But because it's a crow's foot, we are only getting a small turn each time. So like torquing this down can take quite a bit. (metal clacking) Good to keep resetting every single turn here. (torque wrench beeping) (torque wrench cranking) (torque wrench beeping) All right, now that we have everything torqued down, I just need to reconnect my harness. I popped it off in a couple places. Like I was saying, those push bins. So I pushed that back in. With one more up top here. We can get back in place if I can find it now. There it is. I'll push that back down into this cross member. (metal clacking) It's in. And then like the, like I was saying earlier in the video with this wire or this control box here, we honestly didn't even need to take it off. So this might just be a trim-specific issue where this is in the way. 'Cause the way they're showing it it, it was sitting way further back here in the way of our cab side brackets. But, unfortunately, or fortunately for us, it was not in our way. So I'm just gonna reinstall those nuts, have that mounted back up, and then we'll be good to go. With everything torqued down, the last thing to do is just drop in your fifth wheel hitch. Make sure that you put in your pin and clip. And then you're all ready to go and the install is complete. Well, I think that does it for today's look at and installation of the CURT custom fifth wheel installation kit here on our 2017 Toyota Tundra. My name's Kevin. And if you still have questions about what's gonna be the right fifth wheel installation kit for your Toyota Tundra, please feel free to reach out to us via our ask the experts link, a comment on this video, or a phone call to our customer service department, and we'd be happy to help you out on your journey.