Video Transcript for Roadmaster Direct-Connect Base Plate Kit Installation Guide - 2026 Buick Envista

Hello, neighbors, it's Brad here from etrailer, and today on our 2026 Buick Envista, we're gonna be taking a look, and installing the Roadmaster Base Plate. Now this is gonna be the first step, and really gonna set the tone for the rest of mounting of components when flat towing your Envista, and this might be my personal favorite. Overall, this is a great-looking package when it's all installed. So let's take a closer look. Now when it comes to flat towing any car but our Envista today, there's gonna be five main components that are gonna be required. And the first one on the vehicle side is gonna be the base plate.

That's going to structurally mount to the frame of the vehicle, and create a safe place to be able to attach to and tow it down the road, and your tow bar is gonna be connecting to that base plate. That's the connection point between the towed vehicle and the hitch on the RV. Now, just like a trailer, you're gonna have safety cables that are gonna attach from the trailer hitch receiver on the RV to the base plate on your towed vehicle. Diode wiring is gonna transmit the light signals from the taillights on the towed vehicle via the seven-way, to a six-pole plug, and eventually to the taillights, giving you running lights, turn signals, and brake lights. In our case, we also had to use diode wiring to tap into our braking system.

Braking system is going to be the next thing that's gonna be required on all vehicles, and it's going to make sure that the vehicle stops and slows as you apply the brakes on the RV, but also this breakaway switch will make sure in case of a catastrophic disconnect, it would pull this cable, applying the brakes, and bringing it to a stop. Now on this vehicle specifically, it does require the battery to be disconnected, and there's a few different ways you can do that. Manual disconnects are fine, you can unhook the battery each time if you truly wanted to, but today we use the Roadmaster Battery Disconnect with a solenoid that's a push button, I would highly recommend doing that if you're gonna be flat towing quite often. Another thing you may wanna add onto your vehicle is gonna be a charge line, and that's gonna go into your diode wiring port at the six pole, and trickle charge your battery as you go down the road, that way when you get to the campsite, and you unhook everything, your battery is gonna be fully topped off and not having to jumpstart the vehicle. So the cool part with this base plate is it's gonna be nice and clean.

This lower kind of vent section allows those arms receptacles to be here, your safety chain loops are here, you have a mounting point for your six pull, as well as your breakaway switch, and that's something that I can't recommend enough is getting a base plate that has all of that. That way, you're not left trying to fabricate something up to make it work, this really makes it nice and easy. Now really any base plate, it does come down to the fact that you're pulling a fascia off for installation, but this one does a really, really good job, and it's totally worth the squeeze to get this nice, clean look. Now the great part about removable arms on a base plate like this is gonna be this is what it'll look like when normally driving. Pretty clean overall, and when you are ready to flat tow, you just grab your arms, put them in at a quarter turn, that'll snap in place, we'll get this other side, (equipment clanking) and then from here, we can hook everything up.

So something that I will point out today we're gonna be using a Roadmaster Nighthawk tow bar, and that's gonna have the Roadmaster pins, as well as the adapters to hook up to this, but if you have a different brand of tow bar, and you need it to hook up to this base plate, you're gonna wanna take a look at some adapters for the ends of your tow bar to mount up to this. You're not gonna be changing these arms out. So speaking of hooking up, let's take a look at what it takes to get this all set up. If you're a first timer hooking up a flat tow, it's actually pretty simple, and your base plate really sets the tone. I always tell people just go across, and theoretically everything should have a home, so first thing we'll do is get our arms in place, and this is why it's important to have the Roadmaster ends on your tow bar, because this pin is specific to Roadmaster, and allows you to hook this all up. So we'll put those pins in, we've got our linchpin in place, and just like towing a trailer, you're gonna have safety cables, those go on here nice and easy, we'll then get our other side mounted up, as well. (equipment clanking) Now alongside with the tow bar and safety cables, we're also gonna have our diode wiring. (equipment clanking) And also required on this vehicle is gonna be a braking system, so we have a breakaway cable, we'll get that attached, and then from here, you're ready to put your vehicle in flat tow mode, and hit the road. Now luckily for us, our setup is pretty level, but what I would recommend is checking your RV. So from the ground to the center of our pinhole on our base plate, it's gonna be 13 inches. So what you'll need to do is go to your RV, and measure from the ground to the center of the hitch pin hole from there, and if it's over or below three inches of variance, you're gonna need to look at a high-low adapter, chances are with 13 inches like this, if your RV is sitting up pretty high, you're gonna want basically a drop to get it all level, you're looking for a three-inch window, anything more than that can really put the tow bar in a position that it's just not gonna tow nearly as well. Ours today worked out really well, and this is gonna be a great setup. Now we ended up going with a battery disconnect from Roadmaster, as well as the Stay-In-Play duo from Demco, and there's a lot of different ways that you can set up a flat tow, even just having the same Envista. So if you have questions as far as what you'll need, or what you may want for your setup, feel free to reach out to us here at etrailer, we'd be happy to guide you through that process. And as far as the installation of the base plate, it's not terribly hard, there is a decent amount of work that needs to be done to get the fascia off, you are gonna be drilling some holes, but overall, everything makes pretty good sense, and I'll be walking you through step by step on how to get the base plate installed, but with that being said, you're gonna wanna do the rest of your components at the same time, and if any of those are having you a little bit worried about the install, I understand it's kind of a unique thing and unless you've set up a flat tow before, it might be all new to you. So we do have videos for that, but if you're stuck, and don't wanna tackle the install, maybe you don't have the time to place the tools, or even the wanna do it yourself, I understand, and if that's the case, you can use our installer locator to find something close to you to get your base plate, as well as the rest of your components installed at the same time. For your DIYers, stick around, let's get your base plate installed. Now before we hop into the installation, a few things I'm gonna kind of let you know about is there is a ton of hardware that comes with this base plate. So have a nice organized spot to keep that, but there's also gonna be a lot of hardware that comes off of the vehicle as we remove the fascia, so also have a nice organized spot for that, it'll make reinstallation so much easier. And with that being said, the fascia is coming off, so have a spot to store that, because while you have your fascia off, more than likely you're gonna wanna knock out the rest of your components at the same time, so having a spot that this isn't gonna get scratched up is gonna be key. So first step into getting our base plate installed is open up the hood, and we're gonna find that we have quite a few T15 torques bits along this plastic. Now if you're following along with the instructions, I think they mentioned eight per side, I don't have that many on ours, it could be just 'cause this is an ST trim, either way, just go through, and knock out these torque bits that we have here, and we'll get the other side, as well. (drill whirring) And this one has a little spacer, so just keep that with it, and that way, we don't lose this long-term. (drill whirring) Now we're gonna find that we have a 10-millimeter screw that's kind of right where the taillight ends, if you go right in this plastic, the 10-millimeter faces this way, we'll get that taken out, (drill whirring) and then there's a spacer that that bolts into, and so to get that spacer out, what you'll do is just kinda pull this plastic back, and it's gonna look like that. So we'll do that on both sides, and we'll keep this together. The next thing that we need to do is get a either small ratcheting quarter-inch drive with the T15, or I just kind of have a 90 degree attachment, because we're gonna be attacking the T15 torque spits that are in the wheel well, now, if you're struggling, you don't have the tools to do it, what you can do is hop in the vehicle, turn the steering wheel to the other side, that's gonna open that up for you, but we're gonna attack the four of them that we have here, (drill whirring) and then while we have our T15, if you're following along with the instructions, I'm kind of skipping or combining stuff, but while we have the tool, we'll go underneath, and there's a small little mud flap that's just got three T15s, and then on the front fascia, you're gonna find that there's three of them, as well, so we'll get all six of these removed. (drill whirring) Now there's also gonna be three T15 screws that we're gonna need to remove to get these taken out, and these tabs, once you get that screw out, just push those up, that's gonna help us release the fascia later on. (drill whirring) Next thing we're gonna do is pop back this plastic wheel weld trim, and that's gonna give us access to the hardware that attaches the fascia to the fender, now this has a tab, so what I recommend doing is just kind of pulling this straight out and kind of separating it here, and once you get that tab out, you'll probably be able to get the first plastic push pin to pop, there's one here, and then as we go up, there's gonna be more. Now you can pry on them, and hope that they don't crack, but to prevent that from happening, what you can do is peel back the fender liner, and if you reach up, you can kind of feel the backside of the plastic push pins, so if you use a set of pliers, or something along those lines to pinch those, that'll help separate it, what I like to do is I grab like a seven-millimeter deep-well socket and I press that on those push pins, and generally that'll, you can see it just kind of compresses it to where it's gonna allow that to snap out. So I'm gonna get these popped out real quick, and find this one here. Oh, there we go. And when we pull this out, we're gonna have this electrical connection for this side marker, I'm gonna get that separated, and what we'll do is we'll pull back the red tab, there's a little tab that you'll push your finger on here, it's pretty small, so hopefully you have some dexterity, and we got that separated, and this is as far back as we need to go, but what we'll do is we'll grab, I just rolled up some shop towels, I'm just gonna kind of wedge this here, and that's gonna give us access to be able to loosen and remove the seven-millimeter screw that's located here, so I'll just grab my wrench, we'll take that out. (equipment clanking) Now we're gonna head underneath the fascia, and since we've already removed the T15s on each side here, we're just gonna attack the seven-millimeter screws along the bottom side here. (drill whirring) Now to get our fascia removed, you're gonna want an extra set of hands, and you'll notice that I put some painter's tape along the edges of the front fender and the front fascia. That's just gonna help everything so it's not scratching the clear coat. So have that organized spot ready to put your fascia, and to get this removed, what we're gonna do is just kind of pull back where we remove that seven-millimeter screw, and just kind of work your way here, now if you need plastic trim tools, you could use that, but really if you just kind of work this, that's gonna get this separated, and we'll get the other side like that, as well. Now the top here, this will kind of pop up, and this is gonna work back. So if you kind of just pull this forward, this will kind of get everything separated here, and then once you get this kind of loosened up, and those clips, we should be able to get this fascia to come off, just kind of keep pressure along this front edge, there are some clips here, we may wanna pull on the fascia a little, just kind of wiggle it and see if we can't get that loose. (equipment clanking) There we go. Okay. So it is tight along kind of this turn signal here, I guess you'd say, so just kind of pull straight back on that, that's gonna help loosen that up, and then as we kind of work our way down, we'll double check, make sure we're not caught on anything here, but now something to keep in mind is we are gonna have an electrical connection that we're gonna need to separate. So as we pull this back, we wanna make sure not to get too crazy. Now, as we pull the fascia back, have it supported, because on the washer fluid bottle, we're gonna separate this plug. So pull back the red tab, push this in, get that separated, and now we can set our fascia aside. Now at some point, we're gonna be removing the bumper beam here shortly, and attached to this upper shroud, we have a plastic push pin, so if you can get a trim panel tool, or a flathead screwdriver to kind of wedge, get that top section loosened up, and then we can pull out the whole thing. Now, if the center part separates from the bottom, just make sure you have both pieces, and we'll get this popped out, 'cause this does have a spot that it attaches to the bumper beam, so in order to remove that bumper beam, we'll have to take this out. There's gonna be one here, and one on the other side, as well. Now the lower air dam, we're also gonna have two plastic push pins, there's one here, and one on the other side, and on the back side, there's gonna be a plastic clip that you may need a flathead screwdriver to get unclipped here, and it's just kind of in this notch here, it kind of feeds into the inner cooler, so I haven't got this popped off quite yet, but once I do, I'll show you what it looks like, it looks like it'll push it up. Yeah, so just push in that center section, and that tab will unlock, we'll go ahead and do the same thing on the other side. Now with those unclipped, we should be able to get this removed. Now the plastic does feed up behind the bumper beam here, so we can remove the bumper beam, or I'm just gonna slot this out here, and this is not gonna get reinstalled, so you can do whatever you want with this, but we'll set it aside for now. Now our bumper beam has four bolts on each side, we're gonna be removing those, and it's gonna be a 15-millimeter socket, so we'll get those taken out. (equipment clanking) (drill whirring) Now you probably noticed that once you got the hardware out, it loosened up. We still have this 10-millimeter in the center, we'll get that taken off. (drill whirring) Now with our bumper beam, I'm just gonna flip this over, 'cause we're gonna need to modify this a little. What we're gonna be doing is enlarging these, they say do a line and slot it, and I believe the base plate eventually will bolt up somewhere behind here, and it's gonna push this out. So in order for our hardware to eventually go back, what we're gonna wanna do is enlarge this, they say an eighth of an inch to a quarter of an inch, so maybe about where that paint or powder coat ends from the washer, I'm just gonna grind this all out using a burr bit, and as we go on a little bit later on as necessary, we may need to enlarge it a little bit more, but we'll go through, and we're gonna go towards the outside of the bumper beam, and I'll do this on all eight holes total. (drill whirring) The next thing that we're gonna need to do is get our washer reservoir fluid removed. And so there's gonna be a few things that we need to do, because there's electrical connections, we're gonna wanna separate those, and unplug them, so we have these two here, we also have our washer line that's going into it. But the first thing, I'll get this one removed, we'll just pull that tab back, that'll separate that. If you want to, you can remove this plastic Christmas tree off of here, as well. Same goes for here. We have this electrical plug, I'll get that separated, and then as far as the washer line goes, I do recommend having something to pinch this, a lot of times what I'll do is just get a pair of vice grips, and crimp this down, that way it's not leaking once we unhook this. Now we'll pop this off, and see where it's actually leaking from. To get this pulled off though, it should be, it's kind of a rubber grommet, it looks like. So the white cap just goes into this corner piece, and it's leaking from here, so like I said, this is rubber, I'm just gonna grab some vice grips and clamp that down. You could tape it if you have a cap to put over there, whatever holds it on, it's gonna work fine. Now to get this removed, there's again some clips here for the plugs and our washer line, we have a 10 millimeter nut that's on a stud here that will get removed, there's also going to be another 10 mil, if you look over right up top here, right in top of the bumper beam, we'll get that removed, we also have the 10 mil that's located right here on the frame, we'll get all three of those, and then up top where the filler neck is, there's a plastic push pin, so we're gonna get that removed, as well. Once we get all that hardware taken off, we should be able to get the washer fluid bottle moved out, and then the filler neck actually separates. If you wanted to pull that off, you can do that. That makes it a little easier. And then we'll drop this out of the way. Now's a good chance to figure out also if we have any electrical connections still connected, so I had that top one, and now we'll set this aside. Next thing we need to do is grab our side-specific front brace, and then we also have this lower brace that's gonna be side specific, as well. And what we're gonna be doing is this lower brace, you'll see it's got this notch at the top, this will kind of go into a section that it has a slight bend here, but this is gonna become a template, so what's gonna happen is this is gonna kind of rest in here, and we're gonna be drilling out on the pinch weld in order to get this mounted up. But in order to make sure that it's lined up properly, we're gonna grab the side-specific brace. So here on our driver's side, it's gonna look like this. So this section will be eventually the center section that shoots across, so it should line up something like this, and what we're gonna do is just grab the factory hardware bolts that we had, and we're just gonna put two in place, we don't need to snug it down, in fact, I would recommend leaving it somewhat loose, but this is gonna hold that in place for us, and I'll just kind of ensure that everything's guided in, and I'm gonna leave it loose, that way I can slide this in nice and easy, so these lower holes are gonna line up here, and then with a paint marker, I'm going to mark out where these are. So it's really just a template for now, so we'll slide this in, you'll see there's a stud there, so just kind of run it on the inside of there, this raises up, that groove should sit in this portion of the frame, where it's kind of curved, and seeing that this is pretty well-centered up, I wanna push this back, and pretend like it's tightened down a little bit. This should sit pretty squared up. Now, once you're happy with the location on the side, what you're gonna do is grab a paint marker, or something along those lines, and mark this out. And once you have those two spots marked, we're gonna pull this off, and there's gonna be another spot that we're gonna need to enlarge, and that's gonna be on the lower cross member, because eventually on that side plate, you can probably notice that large hole at the bottom, there's gonna be a bracket that attaches to that, and the hole that we're gonna be enlarging is gonna be this guy here, we'll be passing hardware up through this, and so we're gonna need to enlarge this entire thing, as well as drill out these holes. Now what we're gonna need to do is remount this bottom here, and it's nine-sixteenths is what they recommend. What I recommend doing is having this large bolt, because that's what's gonna pass through there, and we're gonna enlarge the top hole, as well as the hole on the bottom for this to pass up, so having that bolt handy means that we can test fit to make sure that this slides in there nice and easy. So let's get that enlarged real quick. (drill whirring) And as far as drilling out these holes on the pinch weld, I'm just gonna use my punch here to make sure it's nice and lined up where I want it, and they recommend a 13/32nds, I don't have that, I have an 11/32nds, which will be pretty close, I'll just kind of wallow it out. Another thing that you can do for this one is grab the smaller hardware, and that's what's gonna pass through here, so just have that handy to test to make sure that it can feed through there. So I'll get this drilled out. (drill whirring) So those drilled out, I can pass my bolt through, life is good there, and then on the bottom, I got my large bolt here, that passes all the way through. So what I recommend doing, get all these shavings out of here, and then where we've drilled out, it might be worthwhile to put a little bit of spray paint on all of the spots, this is gonna be raw exposed metal, and we wanna make sure it's not gonna turn to rust long-term, so we have clear coat, black, whatever it may be, it's all gonna be hidden, so just go through, spray those, and then we're gonna repeat on the other side. And the next thing we're gonna do once you have everything drilled out and painted is we're gonna put these brackets back in place, again, just loose, just two bolts for each, and with both sides in place, we'll grab our center section, and this is gonna allow us to kind of get this lined up, so you'll see that there's this part that kind of sticks out well enough that we should be able to slide this in and get this lined up, and what I'll do is I'm gonna get some of my hardware started here. So you'll find that we have combinations of hardware like this, so it's gonna be a bolt, a split washer, a flat wash, well, two flat washers and a nut, so combination that I'm gonna be doing here is we're gonna do a flat washer on the head of the bolt, and I'll just get this slit in. I'll get one started here, and then as we pass that through, I'll put the flat washer, split washer, and then the nut. Now we're gonna also just leave these hand tight for now, we are gonna come back later with some thread lock, but we'll get all of the eight bolts bolted up in place. (bolts clanking) So at this point, we're ready to get our hardware kind of put back in place, and get everything bolted up. So what we'll do is put our side plates in, and the hardware that we're gonna use to pass through, where we drilled out is gonna be these bolts here, and we are gonna be putting threadlock on everything from here on out, so this is kind of the assembly phase, so all of the hardware that we're gonna use, just make sure you put a little threadlock on there, and what we'll do is we're gonna pass these through, we have a flat washer on there, (bolts clanking) and then we'll grab our brace and feed this in, and then from here, what we'll do is put a flat washer, a split washer, and then a nut, and we'll do that for both. We'll just leave that loose for now. The next thing that we're gonna bolt up, we're gonna grab our brace, and this is going to be where we enlarge the hole on the sub-frame, we're gonna pass the bolt up from the bottom, so put a flat washer, feed this, you can kind of keep that flush right now, because our brace will slide this behind our bracket, and then this goes up, and then from here, we'll feed on flat washer, split washer and nut, (bolts clanking) now the next thing I'm gonna do is get our bolts passed through here, so just kind of make sure everything's nice and aligned. So again, same combo that we've been doing, and we'll put both these on, I'm not gonna tighten these down, because I just want this to keep it in alignment, because what we'll do is we're gonna start torquing down, and we're gonna start on the side plate. So we'll get these passed in first. (bolts clanking) Now from here, we're gonna just start torquing on the hardware, and there is a chart in the instruction manual, so just refer based on the hardware of what it is, what grade it is, and that way we're torquing this down properly, and it's just gonna ensure that long-term it's gonna be tight enough to tow the vehicle down the road, also not too tight putting stress on anything that doesn't need to. So for this one, I have a 9/16th wrench, 9/16th socket, and so we'll get these tightened down first, and torqued down. Now, if you need a torque wrench, we do have them here at etrailer. You can generally go to an auto parts store, and rent one for free, but you'll need this for pretty much all the hardware, so we can get it all properly torqued. (equipment clanking) So at this point, we'll just go through, get everything torqued down properly, a good majority of these are gonna be three-quarter inch socket and wrench combos, so again, follow those torque settings, and torque these down accordingly, and then we'll come back a little after that, and we're gonna figure out what we're gonna do in here with that hardware. So at this point, our base plate's officially on, but we still need to do these bolts, and so we'll take out the factory hardware that we had holding this in place, (drill whirring) and the enlarged bumper beam holes should allow us to be able to pass our new hardware in, which is gonna be these bolts, it's got a split washer and a flat washer, and you're enlarging it because it's gonna be kind of at an interesting angle, so if you need to trim it out a little bit more, by all means, you can do that, but I'd recommend getting your bumper beam, feeding it up, and just starting to thread these in by hand, make sure it's going in nice and easy. Now once you get one side started, get the other side, again, make sure that all eight of them are gonna feed in properly before snugging it down. From there, we're just gonna tighten and torque all of this down properly. Now, as far as getting these tightened and torqued, what I've found to be quite a bit easier is I did have to enlarge just a little bit more. So feel free to grind those out a little bit more than you think, but also this outside edge, as I was trying to shift this back and forth to even get my socket on here, one side would just pinch, and then I shift it and the other side would. So I just notched this all off. That's gonna make it so much easier for us to be able to get a socket on here, and properly torque this down. Now, as I mentioned, we're gonna leave the fascia off, and I'm gonna get the components, but if you wanted to, you can get your washer fluid reservoir put back up, just kind of knock some of that stuff out at the same time, but beyond here, we're gonna catch up a little bit later, and I'll show you how it all looks. So at this point, I got my braking system all in place, I have my diode wiring, and my charge line ready to pass through, so we can start getting the fascia mocked up, and really, we're gonna pretend like we're putting it back on, and then we'll see exactly where we need to cut out, so you might want an extra set of hands to kind of hold that in place, and maybe a marker so you can mark out where it's going to be trimmed, but we'll grab the fascia and test it up. So with it all trimmed out, what I ended up doing was obviously cutting the ones that we inchesre by the arm receptacles, I did cut the one by our breakaway switch, that way it's just facing forward, and as far as cutting these out, I used my multi-tool to just kind of cut as low as I could, and I would highly recommend doing the same, get those notches taken out, because you will kind of have to space this apart a little bit for it to draw in, but once it's over it, it fits really, really well. So I didn't have to cut a whole lot, it was just those little tabs, but really, really, really happy with the finished product. So from here, you'll see, this is why I decided to leave that six-pole off, I mean, theoretically you could have had this, but to feed that over the six-pole is really a pain, so I would recommend doing what I'm doing now, and then getting your diode wiring set up. But with everything back, once I get this done, we'll get our vehicle in flat tow mode, and that's gonna do it for a look and installation of the Roadmaster Base Plate on a 2026 Buick Envista.