Video Transcript for 2026 Chevrolet Tahoe DIY Installation - Roadmaster Direct-Connect Base Plate Kit

Hi, this is Scott with etrailer, and today, we're taking a look at and installing our Roadmaster base plate kit on our 2026 Chevrolet Tahoe. And we often get asked questions about what it takes to get started in flat towing. There's gonna be five main components that you're gonna have to have to get started. You're gonna need your base plate. You're gonna need a tow bar. You're gonna need safety cables, some type of tow bar wiring, and also some type of a supplemental braking system.

Another thing we often recommend is a charge line kit that's gonna keep your battery charged while you're flat towing down the road. Our Roadmaster tow bar we have on our Tahoe today is pretty good looking. It hides well, and it didn't take a whole lot of trimming to get this put on. So we just wanted to show you what it looks like before we get our tow bar and all of our other flat tow accessories hooked up. And this is basically what it's gonna look like when you deal with it day to day when you're not flat towing.

And this is what you're gonna have to deal with. We don't have a whole lot sticking out of the front, a real far, so that way you're not gonna run into it with your legs and stuff. A lot of them will stick out quite a ways. This one kind of tucks back in there and I think it looks really nice. One of the things I like about this base plate is a lot of them that come for this vehicle are just gonna have your tube here where you're gonna hook up your arms and you're gonna have your safety chain loops.

Now with this one, it's gonna have a center bar that goes up the middle. And what that's gonna do for you is they have tabs on these and it takes away a lot of the guesswork when you're getting these set up. So you have a tab that comes out and as you can see, we have our breakaway switch mounted up and we actually have a tab welded on there for that. Not only is that gonna give it a really good solid mounting location, but it takes away the guesswork of trying to figure out somewhere else to put this. Now on our other side, we're gonna have the place where we have our bracket set up for our connector.

We have our six-way connector on here. And they have a tab for that as well. So that just kind of takes away a lot of the guesswork when we're setting these up. I know I've done quite a few flat tows and a lot of the time, it takes a whole lot of time just trying to figure out where we're gonna get things mounted up. And with this, it just takes a lot of that guesswork away. Now to get your base plate all set up and ready to flat tow, super simple. Just want to go in. Turn your arm and it's gonna click in a little tab. You do have a little pin there. It's gonna hold that in place. Now take your end of your tow bar. Just bring that up to the arm. And you're gonna have your pin. Run your pin through the one side. (metal clanking) Now on this one, you're gonna want to run your pin all the way down through the little holes in your arm. Bring that down. Make sure you're latched up. Then just go ahead and hook up your safety cable and the rest of your components and you're all set. So this is what it's gonna look like when you get all of your flat tow accessories all hooked up. Your base plate's gonna supply your attachment point between your tow vehicle and your RV. And with it all hooked up, I think it looks pretty good. Turned out to be a pretty clean install. And with this one, it's a really high quality with Roadmaster as well. Now, if you have any questions about this Roadmaster base plate kit for your Tahoe, you can always get ahold of us here at etrailer. We'd be glad to help you out. Now, as far as installation goes, this one can be a little bit tricky. You are gonna have to take off your front fascia to get this one done, but it's something you can definitely get done yourself if you just take your time. But if you don't have the time or the tools or the place or you plan on getting a whole set up done, you can always take a look at our installer locator and get something done for you locally. If it's something you feel like tackling yourself, stick around, watch our video, and we'll help you get it installed. To start our installation, we have the hood up on our Tahoe. And right here, we're gonna have our extension for our hood latch release. We're gonna have two T15 screws we're gonna need to remove. (tool whirs) With those out, we can just pull out our handle and set that aside. At this point, we need to get this plastic cover out of the way and we're gonna have some plastic fasteners all the way around this. So what I'm gonna do is just start with a screwdriver. You're gonna have a little tab in one side where you can get underneath of that and just pop that up. And we're gonna start working our way around and we'll get all of these popped out. With all the fasteners removed, we can lift up and set our panel aside. With the panel out of the way, we're gonna have some 10 millimeter fasteners here along the top of our fascia we're gonna need to remove. So I'm just gonna use a 10 millimeter socket and we'll work our way across and we'll get those out of the way. (tool rumbles) On the inside of our fender well in the front of our tire, we're gonna have five T15 fasteners. They're gonna go all the way up to right around here towards the middle of our tire. Just gonna use a T15 Torx bit and we'll get those all removed. (tool whirs) What we want to do at this point is just start pulling back our inner fender well. We're just gonna move that back out of the way. Inside of our inner trim for our fender well, we're gonna have a couple fasteners. We're gonna have a seven millimeter that's tucked up in here. We're gonna use a seven millimeter socket to remove that one. Then we're gonna have another one down low, and that's gonna be a 10 millimeter buried down in the front of our fascia. So I'm just gonna go ahead and get those popped out. As for the 10 millimeter screw up inside here, that one's gonna be tricky to get to and really hard to see. The best thing you can do is try and use a deep weld socket to get as far a reach as you can. And I'm using a stubby ratchet. Once you get that going, you can just grab, hold your ratchet in, and then just turn the socket itself until you get that backed all the way out. Makes things a whole lot easier. Now, as we can see as we look inside of our inner fender well, we're gonna have another T15 up inside of there. We want to get that one pulled out. (tool whirs) What that's gonna do is help us pull our inner fender well back a little bit further. And once we get inside here, we're gonna have these two electrical connections here on our passenger side, and these are gonna connect to our fascia. We're gonna have a little tab. Now we're just gonna pull back. Pull that little red tab back. And then we're gonna have the clip just in front of that. Push down on that and pull back. We're gonna have our other larger connector. Pull back on our tab. And we're gonna have this plastic gray plastic surround around that. If I pop that out of its holder, we can see this a little bit easier. We're gonna have our little tabs on the end of that. Now we just want to have our, make sure our red tab is all the way back and pull back the plastic surround towards you. Then you can unhook that. We have our Tahoe in the air and we're gonna have 12 T15 screws along the front of our fascia. We're just gonna work our way across and remove those. (tool whirs) On each side, we're gonna have three seven millimeter screws we're gonna need to remove. (tool whirs) One thing I did find out is up inside of where our front fender meets up with our fascia, we're gonna have two more seven millimeter screws. Now with these, you want to back these off quite a ways. We're not gonna completely remove these. We're just gonna back these off to where they're really loose, but we'll leave them installed. So what these do, these will pinch our fascia down onto against our fender here. So we just need to back these off enough that we can pop this out on the side. With the two seven millimeter screws back in there loosened up, what we can do now is that's gonna allow this to pop loose and come out. Just want to start working our fascia out. And over here on our side, I just wanna get behind our trim and carefully pop this back. And once I start moving that along, we're gonna have these little clips that hold that in place. Pop that along there. Try not to break our clips up top. We're gonna have this little plastic tab. We're gonna pop that over that on both sides. We're gonna have our other plastic tab that comes across the front on our fascia. Same thing. Just want to be careful. Get that to pop loose. Get behind it with your tool. Now we can start working our fascia forward, pulling outward. (fascia pops) (fascia clatters) With everything disconnected, we can set this aside. Each side of our base plate is gonna be side-specific. So this one we're gonna want our cable loops to the inside. Now I like to go ahead and test fit this and bring it up to see where about I'm gonna need to trim. As you can see here, we have this little bracket that comes down. This is basically part of our bumper beam bracket. Now it won't allow us to come up very far. And in your instruction, it's gonna show you just trim out a little tab, but I recommend lifting these up so you're gonna have a better idea of what you need to cut out. So I have marked here and I'm gonna come back through and I'm gonna cut that out with my cutoff wheel and we're just gonna get that cleaned up. So it'll let us push this all the way up to the frame. Now on the other side, it's a little bit less of a cut and I have that marked out as well. Now this side's just gonna be a little bit of a tab. I could probably get by with sneaking it in behind here, but just to make sure I have enough clearance to get it to come up flat and flush against the frame, I'm gonna go ahead and trim this out as well. (tool whirs) Once we get that in so far, it's a little hard to get down to that corner. So I'll just take some vice grips, bend this back and forth, and that'll pop right off. On this other side, I'm basically gonna repeat the same process. (tool whirs) After we've made our cut, I like to come back through with little black spray paint and we'll just cover up those edges to prevent rust. After we got all of our trimming done, what we wanna do is we'll take our base plate and we'll get that put up in place. Now in our kit, we're gonna have our long bolt. And I'm not putting any red Loctite on these yet 'cause we're gonna use this for mocking up where we need to drill our hole underneath. So with our bolt, we're gonna have our long bolt and we're gonna put our flat washer on. And we're just gonna run it through our existing holes in our frame. Get those to go through on both sides. Then we're gonna take two of our large flat washers. We're gonna go on the other side of that with those, followed by our split lock washer on both of those and our nut. And basically what we're doing, we're just gonna set up a little template for where we need to drill our hole underneath of our base plate. What I'll do now is I just wanna get these snugged up. And when I do that, I wanna hold my baseplate up flush against the frame. And just bring that down snug, that's gonna hold it in place. And again, we're not cranking these down. We just want it snug so it'll hold our base plate up. With our base plate uptight against our frame, now we're gonna go ahead and drill our hole. There is a couple different ways you can do this. You can take this off after marking your spot here in the frame where you're gonna be drilling that. Maybe a little white paint or something so you know where you're gonna be drilling. Or you can do it like I'm gonna do and just use this as a template and I'm gonna drill right in through our hole. And we're just gonna take our drill bit and go ahead and start drilling through our frame. (tool whirs and rumbles) With our hole drilled, I just wanna remove our bolt that we have towards the front. Take all of our washers and everything off of there. Reason being is we need to get this handle nut to go in through there and we can't clear that bolt with that in the way. So now what I'll do is you may need to put a slight bend in this to get it to go where you want it to go. We're just gonna get your handle nut in there. And with our bolt that goes through the bottom, we have our lock washer, our large washer. We're gonna take our red threadlocker. Get some on that. And all we're gonna do is run this up into our hole and line up our handle nut. And then we'll get that threaded on and we'll bring that up finger tight. Once we get that started, we have a few threads. I'll go ahead and snug that down. Now after we have our red threadlocker on this one, we'll get this one installed. Then we'll come back through, take the nut and washers off our back bolt, and get red threadlocker on that as well. With all of our hardware back in, we have threadlocker on all of our hardware. We're gonna come back through and start on the bottom bolt. Just get that snug down. Now we'll snug down our side bolts. At this point, we can come back through and we will torque down all of our hardware to the specifications listed in our instruction manual. But first, we're gonna start with our bottom bolt first and then we'll do our side bolts. (tool beeps) Now if you don't have a torque wrench, you can always pick one up here at etrailer. We do have some options available. Or you can take a look at your local auto parts store. Should be able to rent one there. (tool beeps) And what we'll do now is we'll get our center bar put in place. And with this, I'm gonna go ahead and get my red threadlocker on both of my bolts. We're gonna take one of our smaller washers that comes in our kit, put that on both of our bolts. What we'll do now is we'll take our bar. Get that up underneath. With that held up, we'll take our flat washer, split lock washer, and our nut. Bring that down finger tight. Now we'll do the same on the other side. Now this is slotted, so just get it centered up the best you can. And then we'll come back through and we'll snug everything down. (tool grinds) Now we'll torque down our bolts. (tool beeps) With everything torqued down, now you are gonna have an included bracket for your connector. You can get mounted up here on the front. And we also have a spot where we can hook up our breakaway switch, so we can come back through and get all that done. Now one thing we're gonna want to get done is we're gonna wanna get our handle nut wire out of the way. What I like to do is I'll just clamp it on there real tight instead of locking pliers. And you can twist that, move it around, whatever you've got to do. But the main goal is we need to get that to pop out of there. (metal clatters) Now on the back of our fascia down here, we're gonna have this little plastic cover. What we wanna do is remove this. Now we're gonna have some clips up top. Just push in our little tab. Push up on the bottom of those and get those popped out. Now down here, we're gonna have some seven millimeter screws. We're gonna go ahead and get all those popped out. (tool whirs) After we have those out, we're gonna have a couple tabs down here. Just want to lift up on those. Lift up and pull back. Now we can pop our panel out and set that aside. So now to get our fascia all trimmed out, there's a couple different ways you can do this. You can either go by your instructions, but what I like to do is go ahead and get the fascia loosely put in place. That way I can have an understanding of where everything needs to go. So right here, as you can see, we have our tubes for our base plate are back behind this panel on each side and we're gonna have our safety chain loops right here. And we have our electrical connector. And it looks like our breakaway switch is gonna be fine, but everything else is gonna have to get trimmed out. So at this point, I'm gonna try and get away with just cutting from here over. And then I'm gonna have to cut out this square, try and make this look as clean as I can on both sides. Now after this, there's a couple different ways you can do this as well. You can cut this with it up here, but you do run the risk of getting into your base plate back here. So I recommend just get it held up. Figure out where you need to make your cuts. Go ahead and pull your fascia back off, which we're gonna do. And then we'll go ahead and get this cut out. So after we made our decision where we're gonna be cutting, I did mark this white. This part's gonna have to go. So we're gonna cut down here and we're gonna just start cutting right around back in here and we're just gonna follow this square. Now before you start any kind of cutting, always make sure you get behind your panel. Make sure you don't have any wiring harnesses or anything back there that you're gonna cut into. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna use my multi-tool cutter and I'm gonna start making my cuts. (tool whirs) Now what I usually try and do is I'll go a little bit smaller in my cut. That way I'm not getting into this other trim on our upper side. If I need to come back through and trim some of this out, I can. We can do that in final fitting. And for our little edges, a lot of times, you can just go ahead and pop off them little plastic rolls that are rolled up on there with your fingers. You can pick those off. Then we'll come back through with a file when we're all done and we'll clean up all our edges and make them look good. Now we got our fascia put back up in place, and our cuts turned out really well. I really like the way these turned out, even just even with them squared out. Now getting around our plug side here, if I would've did it differently, I probably would've had our bracket off and then just put this back on after we did this. But I did have to maneuver around here, but I was able to keep that upright in place on both of these. It keeps it uniform, and we still have really good access to all of everything we need to on our flat tow setup. So at this point, now that we have our fascia all set up here, we'll start going ahead and getting everything put back together. One thing you remember is don't forget your two connectors that you have on your passenger side. With everything put back together, that'll do it for our look at and our installation of our Roadmaster base plate kit on our 2026 Chevrolet Tahoe. I'm Scott with etrailer and thanks for watching.