Video Transcript for 2010 Chevrolet Cobalt Blue Ox Base Plate Kit: Complete Installation

Ryan: Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Blue Ox base plate kit with removable arms on our 2010 Chevy Cobalt to flat tow your Cobalt down the road. There's going to be five main components that you're going to need, the first one being the base plate, which gives us solid connection point to hook up our tow bar toThe tow bar is going to be that second component. It's going to connect to the base plate and connect to the back of our motorhome, so that's really going to be our main connection point to whatever we're towing down the road.The third one is going to be your safety cables. Now these are going to be there as a backup connection point. If a catastrophic disconnect we're to happen, these would keep everything attached.The fourth component will be tow bar wiring.

What this is going to do is transfer the lighting signals from the back of your motorhome to the back of your Cobalt. That way, everyone knows your intentions as you're towing it down the road.The last one being a braking system. What the braking system is going to do is apply the brakes in the Cobalt whenever you apply the brakes in the motorhome. That way you can come to a more safe and predictable stop and not have to worry about the motorhome doing all the work.This is what the base plate will look like whenever you're not using it and not hooked up to the motorhome. One of the things I really like about this base plate is how it's going to look on the front of your Cobalt.

You can hardly even notice it. It's pretty much flush with the front of our bumper here. It doesn't take up a whole lot of space and just blends in really nicely.It's going to be able to give us that clean look due to the fact that it has removable arms, so whenever you are ready to hook up to your motorhome you would take your arms and connect them to the base plate. The way you would do that is push them in, you can feel it kind of click into position, push down and turn it about a quarter turn until the pins lock into the base plate. The other side, another arm works the exact same way.So this is what it's going to look like once you have your tow bar hooked up to the base plate.

It's really easy, just one pin that's more or less a quick connect, so you don't have to struggle with it. It doesn't take you a whole lot of time.Now the base plate will work with most Blue Ox tow bars and there's also quite a different. A few different types of adapters available that will allow this to pair up with other types of tow bars, so if that's your situation you can see etrailer.com to see if there's a bracket or an adapter available that will allow you to do that.The base plate is also going to give us some hooks here, and these will allow us to easily connect our safety cables to the front of our Cobalt. Overall it's going to give us a really solid and reliable connection point to hook our tow bar up to, all while maintaining a clean factory look.Now as far as the installation goes, it is going to take a little bit of time, but it is all relatively straightforward, and believe it or not, everything fits together nicely, speaking of which, let's go ahead and put the base plate on together now.To get our installation, we're going to be working on removing our front fascia. We'll open up our hood, the first thing we're going to do is take out these four plastic pushpin fasteners here that's securing our radiator cover.

The way it works, take a trim panel tool or a flathead screwdriver, pry underneath the head of the fastener, then you can pull the base out with it as well. Do that same thing to get all four of these removed.Now we move to the front of our wheel well opening. We're going to have three 7-millimeter bolts that we can remove. Once we have all these out, we're going to do the same thing to the other side of our car. Then we move to the bottom edge of our bumper just in front of our front tires. You're going to have another two 7-millimeter bolts. Again, the other side will be set up the same way, so we'll also take those out over there.Now if we move more to the center of our car, just behind the front bumper we're going to have two pushpin fasteners that's securing our fascia to the metal bumper meet. So again we'll use a trim panel tool to get those removed and set to the side.Now what we can do is move back to our wheel wells and the liner that we unbolted, kind of peel that back. It'll expose three 10-millimeter bolts that's securing the front bumper to the quarter panel, so we'll go ahead and pull those out on each side of our Cobalt.Now what we can do is get our fascia completely removed. We can start by grabbing the center and just kind of lifting it over the hood latch. Then if you go to each corner, you can carefully kind of peel it away and work it slowly and evenly, and then we can remove it. Now you don't want to pull too hard because you're not sure if there's any electrical components. In our case we don't have anything up here, but if you did have some wiring that was connected to the bumper you'd simply disconnect it, and then we can set our fascia off to the side.Now on the passenger side we're going to have a ram air intake tube right here, and what we're going to do is just remove the bolt that's securing it to the body of our vehicle. Grab a 10-millimeter and pull it out. Over here on the driver's side we can temporarily remove our horn. That's going to be held in place with a single 10-millimeter bolt. We'll pull that out and then just kind of set our horn off to the side.Now on our bumper support on each side of our vehicle we are going to have to trim away some metal, and so I marked it out here with a yellow pen on each side, according to the diagram in the instructions. Go ahead and use a Dremel tool to get that removed. Now that we have everything trimmed out, what I like to do is just take some spray paint and put a slight layer on it just to help protect that bare metal from any rust.Now on each side this little plastic air dam, just this area here, going right in front of this fastener, what we're going to do is use a pair of tin snips to cut that straight across to give us some more room for the base plate.Now we can grab our base plate and slide it into position, and over here on the passenger side what we're going to do is we'll line up this elongated hole here with the hole that's threaded that was holding our intake tube on. I'm just going to secure it with the factory hardware.On the driver's side we're going to hold our base plate secure using a clamp. That way it pulls it nice and tight to the frame. On each side you want the base plate to sit up flush against the bumper beam, and you also want the base plate to be as far forward towards the front of the car as possible.Now what we can do over here on the driver's side is use the base plate as a template and drill out all five holes to the size indicated in our instructions. With all of our holes drilled, we can now get our hardware in place.What's going to secure the base plate is a bolt that I'm going to put on a split lock washer. All of the hardware that we're going to use to secure the base plate will get a bead of red Loctite. We'll put some of that on the threads. The way these are going to work is they're going to go through the base plate to the frame rail. Now the other side of the bolt is inside of the frame rail. What we're going to use to secure that side is a handle nut. So the way that we're going to get these in the frame rail is through this opening right here.This is big enough to sneak it in, but to make it a little easier and give us more room, I'm going to take a pry bar and kind of just pry up on it a little bit to give us a little more working room. So with that being said, we can get our handle nut inside. Now in some cases you may need to kind of bend the handle nut to get it to line up appropriately with the corresponding hole in the base plate, so it may take a couple times of trial and error to get everything lined up. If you pull the bolt out, you can line up the handle nut a little bit better if you look inside. We're going to do the same thing for all of our remaining holes.So this is what it looks like once you have all your hardware in place. The one thing I do want to point out for this bolt here, this was the hole in the base plate that was elongated. What you're going to want to do is use a flat washer, a split lock washer, and your bolt. So it's the same, you just add that flat lock washer. With all of them in place and hand tight you can come back with a 9/16th socket and snug them all up.The passenger side is more or less set up the exact same way, except we're only going to drill four holes. The hardware is going to be the same, just a bolt and a split lock washer. We'll put our handle nuts in through that same opening in the frame. The only exception is this oblong hole, we're not going to drill that, because eventually we're going to take our bolt and re-secure our air intake back to the body of our vehicle.Once both sides are all snug, we can come back with a torque wrench and tighten the hardware down to the amount specified in the instructions. Now with all of our bolts torqued down, we can come back with a pair of snips and cut off the remaining portion of our handle nuts.So on each side of our vehicle this tab here, this little plastic piece, what we're going to do is cut that flush. Once each side has been removed we want to push that back up into place if we pulled it down a little bit to give you some more working room.Over here on the driver's side we can then take our horn and re-secure that using the factory hardware. Over here on the passenger side, now we can reinstall our air intake. We're going to use the bolt that comes included with the base plate, the long skinny one, as well as a small flat washer. So get it going and go ahead and snug it down.Now what we can do on each side of our Cobalt is grab the included safety cables, wrap them around the frame, and connect them to the convenience link right here on our base plate.Now at this point, it would be a perfect time to move on to some of your other flat tow components if you're installing them, such as your braking system or your tow bar wiring, and that's because we're going to have a lot more room to work up here and it'll just make life a lot easier getting everything else installed first.But with that being said, if you've already installed those components what you'd simply do now is hold your front bumper up loosely to the front of our car and make a few marks on it to where we would have to trim that little area out. That way our base plate can poke though and we're able to access it.I went ahead and just loosely held up our bumper cover to see where our components want to stick through our grille and I just marked them. What I'm going to do is cut an opening, test fit it again and make sure all of our components come through nice and easily. I also went ahead and trimmed out a opening here in the center. That way our wiring and our other braking system components would be able to come through and we'd have access to them.So I went ahead and slid our bumper cover back into position, and now we can re-secure and put the front end back together the opposite way that we removed it.That'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Blue Ox base plate kit with removable arms on our 2010 Chevrolet Cobalt.