Video Transcript for Installing the Blue Ox Base Plate Kit on a 2024 Cadillac Escalade

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 Blue Ox Direct Connect base plate on our 2024 Cadillac Escalade. Adding this base plate to the front of your Escalade's gonna allow you to safely flat tow your Escalade down the road behind your motor home. It's something that you will want to check with your Escalade before you even look into any type of tow bar or any of these or a base plate or any of these components is you want to check whether or not your vehicle is flat towable. There are only specific models that are flat towable and it has to do with the drivetrain. So look in your owner's manual, compare it to the drivetrain that you have, specifically the transfer case for these, you wanna make sure that it matches up to the flat tow version that you need to have in order to flat tow it, otherwise you can damage your vehicle.

But it's a very clean installation. We've got everything hooked up here, but when it's not hooked up, it looks very, very clean on the front of this vehicle. I went one step further and ended up painting the components that we inchesre not black on the front of this to black so that it matched our all black vehicle. A few things that I really like about this base plate is that it's gonna have two tabs that you can mount your 6-pole to, which is not uncommon for a base plate to have, but it is nice because you'll mount your six pole directly in the center of your vehicle. The other thing that's nice about this is that it comes with a bracket that mounts behind your 6- pole so that you can put your breakaway switch safely on the front.

To get this base plate installed, it can seem a little daunting to have to remove the entire front fascia yourself, but truthfully, out of this whole install, that's really not too bad compared to, we are gonna have to drill a couple holes on the side of the frame rail, but that's every base plate that is available for the Escalade. You will, you're gonna have to drill two on the one side. Three are already drilled on the driver's side, but it's really not too bad. If you don't feel comfortable doing this install yourself, please check out our dealer locator. It'll direct you to a dealer closest to you if you put your zip code in, it'll find a dealer closest to you that we have confirmed with them that they can do this installation.

But with that being said, let's go ahead and pull it inside and show you how to do it. To begin our installation, we're gonna have a bunch of push pin fasteners on top that are keeping this plastic trim piece in place. We just need to take all those out. We'll take a flat edge screwdriver, probably straight out on the center and then pop out the base and we'll take this plastic piece out and just set it to the side. Now grab a 10 millimeter socket.

There's gonna be six bolts holding the front of this grill in place or the top of this grill in place and it's gonna take this out. (socket whirring) In our wheel well, we're gonna have four screws. There are T15 head Torx bits that you'll lean. We'll have four along the edge up here, starting right here and going down. And then there's gonna be one straight in here towards the bottom. So we'll just take a T15 Torx bit and remove these. Next we're gonna need to pull back the wheel well liner, pull it out and there's gonna be a bolt that is attaching these two panels right here and it's gonna be right on the edge. You should be able to see it actually, if I pull this out of your way, you can see it right here. This is gonna be a seven millimeter head screw. Now we'll take our seven millimeter socket down here below and we're gonna take the three screws from each of our web flaps. Now we're gonna have a bunch of T15 Torx bit screws under here, but you can see a center of our vehicles is right here. We've got this screw right next to it and then one over here. And all these screws in between, these two that are closest together, we're gonna have that same combo on both sides of the vehicle. Those will stay, the rest of them come out, so there's 12 total down here. We have to remove eight of them. Now on the skid plate, we're gonna have 12 screws that are holding it in place. Some are here on the bottom, some are here on the front of it. We'll just have to use a seven millimeter socket, remove all of them. After you have all 12 of those removed, this actually came down pretty easily. This should come down. And then our two mud flaps should also come down. On this bracket here underneath our vehicle, you wanna hold your wheel well liner back a little bit. There's a 10 millimeter bolt. Good reference point is there's two holes in the frame rail right above it. We're gonna take this out with a 10 millimeter socket. On our passenger side, we're gonna have two connectors we have to disconnect, this one right here, which is a much larger one and then the smaller one up here. On the front side of this where you can see my fingers up here, there's gonna be a little red tab. I'll have to open that up. This is very tricky by the way. Open that up. Push a little black tab and then we have to essentially pry this gray lever open. There's not a whole lot of room to work with here, so just be patient and we'll eventually get it. So on this bigger plug, the locking red tab is on the other side of the gray lever. And then the little black tab that you have to push is on this side. So we'll push that little gray tab, rotate this gray lever over like this and that usually they unplug themselves because it's a cam style, but we'll just pop this connector out. And then for the one above it, that one's gonna be a little trickier. We might have to get a screwdriver in to pop the red tab back and pull it straight out. Over on our driver's side we have another electrical connector that we need to disconnect. You see this little red tab here, we'll pop that back. And then there should be a little black tab on the back side. And if we push it down, might be another one where we need the screwdriver to push down on the tab. Now we've got two 10 millimeter screws we need to remove, one right here and the other one is going to be up there. (drill whirring) Now with an extra set of hands, we'll start peeling off our fascia. It's good to have one person on each side just because these fascias can get pretty clumsy after a while. We'll just slowly pry out on this edge until we get all the fasteners to pop loose. And what you want to do here is once you've got the bottom a little loose, there's a cup in there that if you just pull up, it'll unsnap from there and then we can lift up on our fascia and keep popping 'em out. Just like that. Then we'll take our fascia, make sure there's nothing still connected, and we'll set it in a safe place. Now we can take a trim panel tool with our fascia off and setting off to the side. We'll take this trim panel tool and we've got these little white clips that we need to take out. We're gonna do is we'll push down on the white clip until you get those to pop out. Like so and this is just gonna help us get this center plastic piece out. Now depending on how this base plate ends up going on the front of our vehicle, we may end up putting this back on after we trim it. We might end up leaving it off. Just kind of depends on how it's gonna look. Now if you have the adaptive cruise control, there's four seven millimeter bolts here that we have to remove and we're just gonna let this bracket hang, do some work to our frame rail and then we'll put it back up later once we get everything mounted. Now on these two plastic braces, you can see these upright, I drew some lines on it. We're gonna need to cut 'em off here at the bottom. And then where this little jet out is, we need to cut that straight across there too. So on both of these we'll cut those two pieces out. I'm using a multi-tool. You can use a rotary tool or a Dremel tool if you want. You may even be able to use like a little hacksaw, just anything that can cut through this plastic. (multi tool whirring) On the underside of this bracket attached to our frame rails, we're gonna have two 10 millimeter bolts that we have to remove just to set this aside and then we'll reinstall later. Now with an extra set of hands, we can grab our base plate. It's gonna go up on the inside of our frame rail here. You gotta push up at the same time on both sides. We may end up having to hit it up, tap it up with a soft blow hammer just because it's a very, very tight fit and then we're gonna take a hex bolt, a little bit of red Loctite on it, and then a lock washer and we'll slide it into the corresponding holes. (hammer slams) (hammer slams) Now what you wanna do is you'll get one bolt started on each side to hold the base plate up in place. And then on the driver's side we can, you should be able to get all three pieces of hardware in once you put your handle nuts on the other side, what I would recommend doing is get your three bolts over here, put all three handle nuts on 'em, and then on the passenger side you're just gonna be able to get the one. But what I would do is I would get all three of those tied on the driver, get this one tied on the passenger side and then we could drill our other two holes on our passengers. (drill whirring) (drill whirring) Once we've got everything tightened down, I took a half inch drill bit and you wanna just use it kind of as a guide. That'll mark the center of these two holes. And now we're going to step up our drill bits all the way up to that half inch and drill these two out. (drill whirring) Once you get your two holes drilled out to a half inch, we'll take the, take two more bolts with some lock washers, throw those in and then put the panel nuts on the backside, To get these handles off of them, there's just a little pinch weld holding them on so you can just wiggle it back and forth and eventually that weld will break. Some people will like to just take these and they'll bend them up and twist them up inside the frame. I try to break them off personally if I can, 'cause then they're not in your way in the future. Now we've got all six of our bolts on the side of our frame rail. There's one that goes in each end and there's a little pre-drilled hole right here. But we will have to drill out a hole in the bottom of our frame rail, same thing up to a half inch. (drill whirring) Now we'll take our last two bolts and put 'em up through the bottom of this frame into our handle nuts. (drill whirring) And you'll want to come back with a torque wrench and torque all of your hardware to the specifications in the instructions. If you have this, what we've got going on here, as you can see we're spinning the bolt, but the nut is also turning. Just take a 19 millimeter socket and put it on top of that nut. Now for our safety cables, what we can do is we're going to run it through this opening in our frame rail, run that around, and then we need to connect it with our quick link to the, I like to put one inside of the base plate and one on the outside and we'll just put the quick link down through the top. From here, we can take that lower trim piece, put it back up into place. And then I'm also gonna put our sensor back up into place. But other than that, I'm gonna leave everything else off of the vehicle so that we can run all of our wiring and the stuff for our braking system and then we can come back and do any trimming on the front fascia that we need to. Well guys, hopefully this video is able to help you decide whether or not this kit is right for you and your 2024 Cadillac Escalade.