Video Transcript for Installation: Roadmaster Direct-Connect Base Plate Kit on a 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata

Hey, everybody. Ryan here at etrailer. Today, on our 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata, we're gonna be showing you how to install the Roadmaster base plate kit with removable arms. But before we do that, why don't we check it out and make sure that it's gonna work for you So before we get too carried away, I figured it'd be useful just to kinda touch base and refresh ourselves on the main parts that we're gonna need to flat tow our Mazda down the road in the first place. Now, usually, what we do is actually be hooked up to the motor home and paint a real good picture. But today, we have some really bad weather, and so we're just kinda trying to make do, so bear with us here.

With that said, there's gonna be a total of five main parts. First one is gonna be your base plate. And the purpose of this is to provide us with a solid and reliable connection point. That way, we can hook our tow bar up to it. Tow bar is gonna be the second component.

And what this is gonna do is be the physical link that actually connects the front of our Mazda to the back of the motor home. Third main component will be safety cables. And these are just there in the event of an unlikely disconnect. They're gonna keep everything paired together. Fourth main component will be the tow bar wiring.

And what that's gonna do is transfer the lighting functions from the back of our RV to the back of our Mazda, keeping us safe and legal. And last but not least, the fifth main component is going to be the supplemental braking system. And what this is gonna do is apply the brakes in your Miata whenever you hit the brakes in your motor home, helping to bring you to a more complete and predictable stop. But with that out of the way, let's check out the base plate. So if it we're me and I was wanting to flat tow my Miata, probably the first thing I would think of is how's it gonna look.

You know, sporty cars have an aggressive-type front end, and I think that would be one of my concerns. And honestly, with this setup here, I think it's about as good as it can possibly get because at the end of the day, you're still gonna have a lot of components up front here. So it's gonna be nearly impossible to have everything completely hidden and so on. But I feel like they did a pretty good job of, you know, keeping it as sleek as possible and still being easy to use, which kinda brings me to my next point. Since this does use removable arms, whenever you are ready to use it and hook up to your tow bar, it's gonna be really straightforward. All you're going to have to do is take the arms and place them into the base plate, rotate it about a quarter turn, and that's going to lock it in. And so once these are in there, that's gonna give you the mounting point to be able to hook that tow bar up to. So due to the bad weather, we put together kind of a little motor home simulator deal here, just so we could have our tow bar and stuff and try to paint a better picture of what's going on. So whenever you have your arms in and you're ready to hook up, you take your tow bar arms, line 'em right up. Take the pin, run it through, lock this pin in. And your safety cables will clip right through here. And obviously, you'd wanna hook up your other components and get them plugged in as well. So the base plate is gonna work with the Roadmaster Direct-Connect tow bars, you know, with the ends like this, so it'll plug right in. It'll also work with a lot of different other tow bars as well with the use of an adapter. So perfect scenario today, we actually have the etrailer.com SD tow bar, and we put the adapters on the ends, and that allows the two to pair together. So a lot of the different brands will have an option like this so you can do that. I will say with the etrailer tow bars as well as the Demco ones, the adapters aren't gonna come with the pins that actually lock them into the removable arm there. So you can always grab them separately. I can't speak for all the other manufacturers and their adapters, but definitely something to kinda think about and check into. You don't wanna get all your stuff and then come to realize that you can't even hook it up 'cause you're missing a pin. So I just wanted to point that out. This is what the front of your Mazda will look like whenever you're all hooked up to your motor home, for the most part, you know, as far as all this is concerned. And I think it looks good. You know, everything's organized, easy to see, easy to get to and everything else. So, you know, at the end of the day, a base plate's a really important piece to your flat tow puzzle, if you will. You want it to be reliable and everything else 'cause it's gonna be responsible for, you know, providing us with that good attachment point. And with this one, there's definitely an abundance of attachment points holding the base plate onto the vehicle, which kind of brings me to the installation side of it. As far as getting it on, it's probably one of the more difficult ones, I'd say. And it's not even really that it's, you know, over-the-top, confusing, or anything like that. There's just a lot of hardware, bolting everything together. So stay patient. As long as you take your time, really shouldn't run into too many issues. But speaking of install, why don't we go ahead and get it done together now To begin our installation, we're gonna be here at the front of our Mazda, and we already need to take off the front fascia. That way, we have the space we need to get our base plate on. And so what you're gonna do, pop the hood. Then, if you look along this edge here, we're gonna have three fasteners. So we'll have a Phillips head screw. Pull that out. We're gonna have two pushpins. And the way to get these out, you can take a flathead screwdriver, kinda just pry underneath the head and work it up till it comes out. Same thing for this one here. And I wanna mention from this point on, anything we do to one side of our vehicle, we're also gonna do to the other side 'cause it'll be set up the same way. Now, if we move to our front wheel well liner, we're gonna have four pushpin fasteners we need to pull out as well. It does help if you turn your wheels in one way or the other. You know, it gives you more space. But just like the other ones, we're going to pry underneath the head of 'em. These ones you might have to kinda finesse a little bit more. Being the wheel well, you know, they get dirt and stuff in there and you might have to kinda work 'em out a little bit better. So go ahead and do the same thing here to get all these out. So with the fasteners undone here, you can grab your liner and kinda peel that back. And there's just gonna be a light, and I'm just gonna quarter turn it. So just turn it quarter of the way, and that'll pop it out. And then, if we continue to work up where our front fascia actually meets the quarter panel, there's gonna be a screw going up, holding the two together. And so we're gonna pull that out using an eight-millimeter socket. Underneath the car, along this front edge, we're gonna have some more fasteners. This one here in the corner, with these, you can use a Phillips head bit or it looks like, I think an eight-millimeter thick bit as well. We'll work our way around. And then, there's gonna be a pushpin right here that we'll pull out too. And in the middle of our vehicle, we'll have two more fasteners holding this plastic cardboard shield on with a Phillips or an eighth. And then, you should be able to kinda lift that up and pop it down a little bit. Now, with and extra set of hands, we can get our fascia off. I do wanna note I put some painter's tape along the seams and everything. That way, we don't have to worry about scratching it. But what you're gonna do is just work from the corner, and actually, it's coming right off. So continue to work it out. Looks like we might have some electrical connectors here. That's just securing the wiring to our fog light assembly. But these aren't popping out. Sometimes, what we'll need to do is grab a trim panel tool or a flathead screwdriver to help kinda pry up on that. Since that piece is pried off, that should disconnect this here. So you push down on that tab, pull it off, and that should be it. Obviously, it'll be set up the same way on the other side. So once that's disconnected, we can get this removed. And with all that out of the way, we can set our fascia off to the side. So if you look underneath your bumper beam, there's gonna be this plastic air dam deal right here on the side. And we just need to trim off a small portion of it. So to make it easier, I'm gonna take out this pushpin fastener. That should allow us to kinda pull it down some. And essentially, I'm just gonna cut it flush with this piece that comes out there. So just use a pair of tin snips. Probably use a regular pair of snips or something along those lines as well. Regardless, this material does need to get removed. And once I have it trimmed off, go ahead and just pop this right back into place. So we're gonna pop this back in. If yours gets hung up, just look up top. 'Cause kinda prying it down, it might get hung up on other piece of plastic up there. So if that's the case, just check up there, but pop that back in. And now, we can remove these pieces here. So you're gonna have three 10-millimeter bolts. One there and two there. So I'll grab our socket, and pull these all out. And get this removed. If you look right here and we go up, we're gonna have some wiring attached to this plastic piece. So a trim tool will pop that off. And looks like that's all we'll have to pull off. And once that is off of here, we can remove these two 10-millimeter bolts. And get this piece out of the way. We can work more over to the side. We see here, we're gonna have a 10-millimeter, as well as that one. We'll get both of those out as well. Now, if you look kinda way up, honestly, you'll see this plastic splash shield. There's gonna be two bolts holding it in. There'll be a 10-millimeter, so there's one here. And then, we'll go underneath the car to see the other one, much easier to access. So we'll go ahead and get this one removed first. So if you look, here's the other bolt there, and it's kinda buried, but you can definitely get to it. More or less, just locate your front sway bar bushing, which is this piece here, and that bolt's right above it. Not a lot of room to work, so with this one, I'm just going to use a regular wrench and work this out by hand. So with that other bolt loose, you can grab the splash shield, get that out of the way. And what I'm gonna do is put these two bolts back in here. I thought by removing 'em, it'll make it a little bit easier to get those ones we just took out removed. Really didn't do much. So honestly, you know, if you want to, you could probably skip this step. If you already took 'em out, I mean, not really a huge deal. They're pretty easy to get to. We'll just run 'em back in. So what you can do now, this bolt right here, kinda behind this metal flange, we're gonna pull that out. So that's a 12-millimeter. And what we're gonna do is take some red Loctite. You can grab this here at etrailer. And all of the hardware that we're gonna use to secure the base plate is gonna receive some of this red Loctite. We're gonna take the support brace, and these are side-specific so make sure you have the right one, but this is gonna kinda sit up in there. This front part should line up pretty close with this hole right there. And this hole, you're gonna take that bolt we just pulled out, put it through, and then simply just resecure it up into place. Work that in there. I can manage to get this in here. Probably one of them deals where you just kinda have to spin it in just right. Once that's up into place where it needs to be, we can take that bolt and we'll get that started. I'm just gonna try to hold this in position here. And while I'm doing that, we can tighten the bolt down. So this is the other side of our vehicle, and it's set up the same way. Just wanted to give a different view of what was just put in. Now, we can take our main receiver brace and line this up here. And what we're gonna do is you can take three of these bolts. We're gonna put on a split lock washer, flat washer, and we'll just get these started on each side, hand-tight. That way, the base plate will support itself. Once you have those three bolts started and hand-tight, we'll come back and snug 'em down. Now, if you look at her base plate and kinda buried up here, there's gonna be a hole in the base plate. And that'll go through that support bracket that we put on earlier. And you're gonna take one of these bolts, put on your Loctite, push that through. It's gonna be tricky to see, but on the other side where that bolt comes out, you're gonna put on a split lock washer and a hex nut. So once that bolt is in there, you can come back with a 19-millimeter or a 3/4-inch socket and wrench and snug this down. If you look now on that back brace, the hole closest to the back of the vehicle is gonna line up with the weld nut inside of the frame rail. And what you can do is take one of the smaller bolts, split lock washer, and flat washer, and thread this up into place. You can see how I have it started by hand. I'll come back with a 10-millimeter and snug it down. What we can do now over here is take off our headlight, some of this stuff, to give us access to that part of our frame. We're gonna have a wire connected to our induction system here, so we'll just pry that off, and we're gonna have a 10-millimeter head bolt there and pull that off. This might be connected more in the engine bay, kinda loosen it up, come back to it. I feel like if we take our headlight out first, it'll probably be easier to wiggle this piece out. But it looks like we're gonna have two more 10s. And a small plastic fastener. So this is a Phillips head. With these, you just lightly turn left. You don't wanna apply really any downward pressure. Almost just the weight of the screwdriver is enough. And we can work that out. What we can do now, this sensor here, we can remove that. So actually, there'll be this 10-millimeter bolt. We can pull that off. And then, we can disconnect our sensors around, sorry, our connectors in the bottom of the headlight. So you can push down on the tabs, and they're all gonna be pretty similar. And while you're pushing down on 'em, you can work 'em apart. This is probably gonna have to come free here. So I'm just thinking while the headlight is still somewhat attached, it'll probably be easier to do this stuff now as opposed to when it's disconnected and wants to fall down and everything. I have to work this out as well. And that looks like it's about it as far as that's concerned. There is gonna be another bolt right here. That will be a 10-millimeter. Go ahead and get that one removed as well. The headlight's still attached. Looks like maybe this bolt up here is still holding it in, so we'll pull that out. Hopefully, we can start to try to maneuver this out. Looks like it still wanna hit something, I might come back and actually pull that one out as well. It might just make it easier. Let's see if this piece actually needs to come off or get it loose enough to allow us to try to work our headlight out here. So that was holding that on, so put that out of the way. What we can do now is sneak out the headlight. Now, back in the engine compartment, if you look where that air intake tube starts to run, almost as soon as it enters the engine compartment down here, there's gonna be another bolt holding it in. So we'll pull that out with our 10, and it looks like after that, we should be good to go and be able to remove this. Get that outta the way and hopefully try to work this tube out of position. With all that stuff out of the way, we can now cut off this piece of metal. So there's a diagram in the instructions. It kinda tells you where to go. I marked that out. I'm gonna use an air saw like this, maybe a Dremel tool, combination of the both, kinda whatever you got to cut this out you can go with. So with that said, I'll go ahead and get this material removed. So with this cut out, I did shoot some spray paint on there just, you know, so we don't have bare metal exposed. Let it dry. And now, we can take these straps and put these on. These are side-specific, so pay attention to the instructions. Make sure you have the right one. But this is gonna lay on there like that. And you can see, that hole's gonna line up with the existing hole in our frame, which will go straight through. And on that support bracket that we bolted on to the bottom side, it's gonna line up with the hole in that as well. And so we're gonna set this on, and then we're gonna take the six-inch bolt and one of these small half-inch flat washers. And from the bottom up, run this all the way through until it comes out up here where we can get the rest of our hardware on it. So on the bottom side, we're gonna see that other hole in our back support brace lining up with the hole in the frame. We'll take our bolt we showed all the way up, like we talked about. Here up top, you see where our bolt's going through. With our bracket on it, take a split lock washer, don't forget your Loctite on the threads as well. Finish it off with a hex nut there. Let me just get this hand-tight right now. So now, back underneath. So if you remember the strap that we just put on, there's two holes in it. The other hole, we need to get attached. So that's gonna line up with this hole down here in our base plate. Problem is though, we have to create that hole. So I'm gonna take a my drill bit and drill straight as I can up through the frame. And that way, we can get some hardware in there. So with everything lined up, back up top, we can take the seven-inch bolt and drop that through. So when you're going to drop your bolt through, you can see that there's a space or gap in between the bottom of the frame and our base plate. And so you're gonna take the spacer block and line that on up, and then drop your bolt through it, and that spacer block will fill that gap there. Once totally dropped through, you can take a big, flat washer, a split lock washer, and a nut. So once that strap is in place and our two bolts, if you recall, we left both these hand-tight, we'll just come back and snug 'em down using a socket and wrench. On the side of our base plate here now, right above it, we're gonna have a wire that's connected to the frame, and we're just gonna pry that off, kinda move it out of the way and hopefully won't be in our way. 'Cause we're gonna take these side brackets. Again, these are side-specific so, you know, make sure you got the right one. And these are going to just sit here like that. It looks like the wire will clear. And you wanna make sure that this is pushed as far forward as possible. 'Cause if it's, you know, if it's a little crooked like that, where we put that other bolt down through the frame, if it's crooked, then chances are pretty good when you go to drill the hole, you know, that bolt's gonna be in the way. So make sure it's sitting up like that. And what we'll do first, these two holes, you're just gonna take these bolts, push those through. And then, on the backside of those bolts, we can get a split lock washer and a nut started. So here's our bolts. I put on our split lock washers. Get the nut started, and you're gonna hold that bracket how you want it, like we talked about, as far forward as you can. And while you're holding it, we'll come back and snug these down, so it stays in place. So with that tight, now, we can use this as a guide, the hole up here for our drill bit, and we're gonna drill straight through the whole frame. With the hole drilled, take your five-inch bolt and your Loctite, run that through to the other side. Then, on the other side, we can get on our flat washer, split lock washer, and nut. And once we have that hand-tight, we can come back and snug it down. Now, at this point, once all the bolts are in and snugged down, we can come back with a torque wrench and tighten down all of the hardware to the amount specified in the instructions. If you don't have a torque wrench, you can always grab one here at etrailer. Or a lot of times, you can go to your local auto parts store and they'll have one there available you can rent. So once everything is torqued, you can put your headlight and your air tube back in the opposite way that you removed it. And from here, it would be a great time to install any of your other flat towing components like wiring and your braking system. And I say that because with the front fascia off, you just have a lot more room to work. So that's exactly what I'm gonna do. And then, once we're done, we can trim the fascia out and put it back on. If you're not installing those components or you already have 'em in place, you would simply just reference your instructions. They'll tell you where you need to trim to allow access to the base plate. And then, you put the fascia back together. So now, with all of our flat towing components on and installed, we can come back to our fascia and we are gonna have to trim it out some like we talked about. So I referenced the diagram in the instructions and just kinda drew out where we're gonna cut. This is kind of an odd shape. I'm gonna use a small, little saw like this. You could probably use a Dremel tool or, you know, maybe some type of routing-type drill bit or a hole saw or something. You can come up with something, I'm sure. So what I'm gonna do is just very carefully cut the shape out here. So once that's cut out, you can do the same thing on the other side. And then, if you want, you can always come back with a file or razor edge or sandpaper, something like that, and kinda clean these edges up. So now with our fascia trimmed, we can reinstall it the opposite way that we removed it. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Roadmaster base plate kit with removable arms on our 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata..