Video Transcript for etrailer Invisible Base Plate Kit Installation Guide - 2024 Ram 1500

Hey, everyone, Ryan here at etrailer. Today on our 2024 Ram 1500, we're gonna be showing you how to install the etrailer.com base plate kit. Before we do that though, let's just take a moment, we'll check this one out and make sure it's gonna be the right setup for you. Right off the bat, a base plate is gonna be one of the five main parts that you're gonna need to flat tow your ram down the road safely behind your motor home. The other four will be your tow bar wiring, your safety cables, your supplemental braking system, and your tow bar. But with that said, my first impression of the base plate, I think it looks awesome.

It comes through these factory openings here, which in our case we had tow hooks there to begin with. It'll work on trucks that have the plates here, you know, little covers without a tow hook, you'll just have to remove that. So it doesn't really look out of place by any means. You know the finish of it, this more of a matte black finish matches the plastic really well. And so honestly I don't really think it'll a whole lot better in terms of appearance.

I do like the fact too that there's these little plugs that they give you, that when you're not using the base plate, you can pop 'em out and be able to put the arms in. But when you're not using it, you know it's just a nice touch there. Makes it look a little bit better, keeps openings closed up, and hopefully in better condition. With that said though, when you are ready to hook up, really straightforward, it uses these removable arms here and those are just gonna go into place. Rotate 'em about a quarter turn, and then you'll have these pens that you put in to lock 'em down, and that's really all there is to it.

You know, the other side of the truck be set up the exact same way. And one of the benefits that I like about the base plate is how versatile it is in terms of what tow bars it's going to work with right out of the box. So this will be compatible with etrailer.com tow bars, Demco tow bars, as well as Blue Ox tow bars. And even if not, let's say maybe you have a Roadmaster tow bar already that you really like, but you want to use this base plate, changes are really good. You can still make that work, because there's adapter ends available that go on the end of the tow bar that you can switch out, and allow you to pair 'em up with this particular base plate.

As far as what type of trucks a base plate is going to work with, it'll fit all the Ram 1500s really with a couple of exceptions. That's the TRX model and the Rebel model. The good news is though, if you happen to have those particular submodels, there are base plates available that will fit those. So if that's your situation, feel free to check those out. But other than that, at the end of the day, great all around base plate. You know, I think it looks really good being that the ends are compatible with a lot of different tow bars. It's really versatile, and I think it should work out well in a lot of different situations. As far as the installation goes, this one really wasn't too bad. You do have to remove the bumper and these little plastic pieces here, which can be a little tricky. You know, just be careful. There's a lot of plastic tabs and stuff back there, and I'll show you a couple things that I have learned over the years to hopefully make it a little easier on you. With that in mind though, if this is something you don't even wanna mess with, you can't always use our dealer locator network. And that can help you find a shop in your neighborhood that can do something like this for you. But if you're gonna do it yourself, hang around, we'll go ahead and get started on it now. To begin our install, we're gonna be here at the front of a Ram, and we're gonna have to remove this little panel here, underneath of our headlight and above our bumper. And so a lot of that'll require us to work inside of the wheel well opening. Definitely helps if you turn your tire in or out, gives you a lot more room to work. But we're gonna have three eight millimeter head screws right along this edge. (tool buzzing) Go ahead and get all these pulled out. And I wanna mention too, from this point on, whatever we do to one side of our truck, we're also gonna do to the other side. So we set up the same way. (tool buzzing) On the inside portion of your wheel liner, there's two more eight millimeter head screws. (tool buzzing) Get these pulled out and then this piece can be dropped out of position. Along this wheel wall liner, we're gonna have four more eight millimeter head screws. (tool buzzing) You are also gonna have this big push pin fastener right here, and we can remove it. You can just take a trim tool or even a flathead screwdriver. (tool thumping) Just pop it out of position there. Grab our wheel wall liner, just kind of work that up and out of the way. That way we can get access to a fastener. It's really difficult to see, but right where your quarter panel and your fascia meat, there will be a 10 millimeter head bolt in there that we need to remove. So with this bolt being so tricky to see, it's pretty easy to get to actually. But seeing it's a different story. So I'm just gonna work this out. (tool rattling) So that right there, that's the bolt that you wanna be working with. Around the edges that we're gonna be working on, I put some painters tape just so we don't accidentally scratch anything up. And if your truck has this trim piece, this wheel wall trim, we're gonna have to remove it, you know, a little ways. So I like to just kind of grab it and work it, and start to kind of get everything moving. And there's some plastic fasteners that are attaching this and what you'll have to do coming from behind, and kinda squeeze the fastener there. There's several of them. You're just gonna have to kinda work your way up here. Once I get one or two popped out, it'll be a lot easier to kind of see what's going on here. And so these are the fasteners that I'm dealing with. I'm just coming in behind there, and squeezing 'em with the tips of my finger, and pulling out to get this released. Sometimes too, you can get 'em out there with a pair of needle nose pliers, and do the same thing. So I'm just gonna continue to do that up until I don't know about here. About 1/3 of the way up. So I got this piece pulled out. So about here, you know, like we talked about. And then to prevent it from kind of snapping back in on itself, and I'm gonna do that again. I just took a little piece of foam. You can use a rag or something too. Stuffed it in behind there just to help keep it drawn away from the body of our vehicle. You should be ready to remove that little piece now. And it's tight for sure, but in the wheel well here there will be a little black plastic piece, and if you take a screwdriver and kind of just pry down on it very lightly, so that's what I was doing there, that will allow you to kind of start actually pushing that piece out that we're trying to get off. So once we get it free back here, should be able to start working it out. Just be really careful. Work our way around here. And it feels like you might be getting kind of hung up here. Oh, there we go, it popped free. Sometimes what you might have to do, so all that's holding to sit in is these tabs, right They get pressed into place, all right, there's little openings there. And sometimes they get hung up. So those corner ones hung up, might be real tricky to see and I'll show you what to do. If you get a real small flathead or something, and while you're kind of, you know, applying some pressure to it, if you push down on those tabs, that'll usually give you a little bit of extra leverage that you need to get 'em released here. Just take your time with 'em. And there we go. I was able to get this whole panel released and now we can set it off to the side. So now back in the wheel wells, it looks like just over here on the driver's side, at least in our truck, we have this big electrical connector. You wanna get that disconnected. So you push that red tab out, and there's this big gray lever here. And what I did, I pushed down in this black part that released the gray lever. Then you should be able to push that lever forward and get it unplugged. We need to get our bumper removed now. So on each side there's gonna be a total of three nuts. One here, one there, and then one right here. And you can use an 18 millimeter socket to remove 'em. (tool buzzing) What I like to do, is the first one, I like to just leave a few threads on it. You know that way when we take all the fasteners out, bumper's not just gonna fall off. So go ahead and get these other two out. (tool buzzing) With this inside one, it's definitely a little tight. You might need to use a box wrench or if you happen to have a mid depth type socket like this one, kind of get in there with the power to at least. (tool buzzing) I'm just gonna break it free with the tool and just come back and remove it by hand. With an extra set of hands now, 'cause this bumpers definitely heavy. We removed those last two nuts that we left on hand tight, and we should be able just pull those straight off the front of our truck, make sure we don't have any electrical, which we don't. And we can set this off to the side for now. If your truck has these tow hooks, you need to get those removed. So there's two bolts. This one here we pull out with a 21 millimeter socket. (tool buzzing) We can switch out for an 18. (tool buzzing) Pull this one out, it's a real long bolt. We can pop our tow hook off there. We'll set that off to the side. And then with this bolt I'm gonna do set that down for a sec. I'm going to grab just a little bit of the Loctite. It looks like there's some on from the factory. Just put some back on there. It's not gonna hurt. We'll get this started. Tighten back down. (tool buzzing) You can grab our base plate now, and these are gonna be side specific so make sure to check your instructions. But it's pretty obvious what side goes where. This flat side will be on the inside of our frame rail. And so we're gonna be dealing with this attachment point first. We're gonna utilize the factory opening there. So we'll take our bolt and all of the hardware that we're gonna use to secure the base plate. You wanna put some of this blue Loctite on. So we'll just raise this up into position here. I'm gonna make sure come back with a torque wrench now, and we'll tighten this bolt down to the amount specified in the instructions. And any of the hardware that we end up torquing, you can find that torque spec in the installation manual. So we use our base plate as a template now and where we need to drill. We're gonna start with the hole on the bottom here, and just create a hole right through the bottom of our framer. (drill buzzing) With that whole drilled, you can take your fish wire, take the coil end of it, you'll push it up through the opening and towards the front of the truck. That way the end will come out here, take one of these bolts, thread that onto the fish wire, put it in the frame, drop it down, and then remove the, pull wire there. Once we get that removed, we'll put some of the wheel Loctite on threads. You can take the flange nut, we'll go ahead and get that started. If you're having a hard time getting the nut started on there, just 'cause the bolt wants to spin, one thing you can do is take a flathead screwdriver, just apply a little bit of side pressure to the bolt, and that'll keep it steady. So you can get this started. And then we'll come back with a 3/4 inch socket and snug it down. (tool buzzing) So what I like to do is get, you know, one bolt going, snug down, and torque before that Loctite cures. And so that's what we'll continue to do. Just kind of work one bolt at a time until they're all complete. On the inside of the frame rail, we're gonna have three more openings there, and more or less we're gonna do that same exact thing. Get these drilled out, get that same hardware combination in one at a time until everything is tightened up. (drill buzzing) Got all these installed and torque down like we talked about, same exact way that we did the other one, you know. And then once that's done you can take one of these safety cables that they give you. And this is pretty straightforward, it just attaches to this little opening down here in the base plate using one of the D links. And then I just wrapped it around and over the frame rail there. So really nothing to it. One thing I do like to do is come back once I have that all complete, and use some zip ties here and there just to help prevent it from bouncing around, and clunking whenever you're going down the road. Now we're ready to reinstall our bumper. It looks like we shouldn't have to trim anything but it will be a tight fit. But in theory it should go back on the opposite way that we removed it. I think we're gonna try to kind of get on the bottom and then let's swing it into position here if we can. Might even have to go at it from the top at an angle just to get everything to clear here. (bumper rattling) If you get it all together, that's awesome. If not and we have to come back and do some trimming or anything like that, we'll touch base then. But this should all pop into position. If I run into any issues, you know, we'll address 'em when that happens. So we we inchesre able to get the bumper back on without having to trim or anything. And don't get me wrong, it's tight. What we kind of found is coming at it right with the bumper, kind of raked in towards the back. And then kind of swing it on from the bottom side and then just kind of maneuver each side a little bit to get it go back. Same thing to the other side. And just kind of gradually work it into position. And once you kind of clear the base plate, you know you'll feel it. The bumper will just kind of push right back on. So with this loosely in place, we'll go ahead and reinstall everything the opposite way that we removed it. And with everything all back together, that'll do it for our look at and our installation of the etrailer.com base plate kit on our 2024 Ram 1500.