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Install your fifth wheel trailer hitch in half the time with this custom bracket kit. Requires less drilling than universal kits and provides a custom fit for your vehicle. Includes everything you need for installation.
Features:
Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Hi there Heavy Haulers today in our 2015 GMC Sierra 2500, we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install CURT's Custom Fit 5th Wheel Rail Kit. And this is what our rail kit will look like when it's installed. You'll have two rails located in your bed and they will be spaced far enough apart with various different slots on them, to accommodate most different types of 5th bow's out there. This rail kit is going to be custom designed for your Sierra, where it will sit in our bed and have all the hardware that we'll need to get it installed, including all the spaces and brackets that properly line up in the raised sections that we have here in our bed, to ensure that we don't crush it down. It's a pretty quick and easy installation. So why don't you follow along with me and we'll go over it together so you can have the confidence to do it at home.We'll begin our installation by getting the appropriate location for one of our rails, by measuring the distance from the truck bed here at the back to the edge of our rail.
This is going to vary depending on if you've got a short bed or if you have a long bed. We're currently working with a short bed, but you'll find the measurements for both in your instructions. So we're just going to go ahead and line it up with where it needs to be on each side and also center it evenly, side to side. All right. Looks pretty good there.
Make sure you've got it all at the appropriate location.We're then going to check center and the easiest way usually to do this, is to just use the corrugation in the rails to center it. Of course, you can also measure from the side to verify that way as well. We're going to go ahead and use a paint stick and we're going to be marking our holes, right in the center. We're going to do the four corners, as well as the center towards the rear of the vehicle.Now that we've got all those marked, we're going to use a one eighth inch drill bit to make a pilot hole at each location, and then we'll be enlarging those to nine sixteenths once we've finished all of our pilot holes. After drilling your pilot hole, you just want to check to make sure that there's nothing below that you're going to damage or anything like that.
That's the big purpose of doing the pilot hole firstWe're now going to enlarge them to nine sixteenths. You can do this with either a nine sixteenth drill bit or you could use a step bit like this to step it up. If you're using a step bit, I recommend that you keep one of the bolts nearby so you can just check to make sure you're not going to enlarge it too large.And we're just going to repeat this for all of the remaining holes. To protect our freshly drilled holes from corrosion, we're going to go ahead and vacuum up all the debris and then use some clear coat to cover them up. We're going to do that for all the remaining holes.We'll now need a fish wire our hardware into place on for the side rails.
We're going to be using the fish wire that comes in our kit here. And there's two holes located here just above our jounce bumper, one on each side. These are the holes that we're going to feed our hardware through. So we're going to take the coiled end, we're going to push it into the hole and then it's going to come out of a hole that's larger on the other side of the frame rail, just above our jounce bumper. And here's the hole on the other side of the frame rail. On the driver's side, you're going to have some electrical wiring that goes over it. But you'll see it comes out of the hole here. The hole's actually like just above the wiring there. But all we need to do is just be able to access the coiled wire here on the other side, because then we're going to take the large carriage bolts that come in our kit and the large spacers.We're going to start by placing the spacer over the coiled end. And then we can take the large carriage bolt and thread it onto the coiled end. We can now push those into the frame. And then we can just pull our coiled wire until the bolt comes out the hole. Sometimes, you do got to wiggle a little bit to get it to cooperate with you. And then we can pull our fish wire through the hole. We're going to leave the coiled end threaded on it for now. And if some of it pulls off, kind of like mine did, make sure you add it on there. So they don't want to lose it in the frame, but we're going to leave it because we're going to thread in the other carriage bolt here on the front hole, and we're going to use the exact same method we did, to get this one in over here.We can now take our side plate and we're going to put it into position. The top part where it angles over is going to face towards the inside of the vehicle, over the frame. And the, chamfer here at the back where it kind of has like a 45 degree angle to it, this is going to face towards the rear of the vehicle. Here on the other side, we've got a nice rounded edge.We're going to take our coiled wires. We're going to feed them through the top holes in our bracket. They're the ones that are slightly slotted. And we're just going to bring that up, set it on the frame rail and pull our bolts through. This is why we left our coiled wires on there. And then we can take the flange nuts, that come included in our kit. We're going to take off the coiled wire, try not to mess up the coiled wire too much because we are going to need to use this again over on the other side. I know it's tempting to just pull it off of there, but then you're going to have a difficult time threading it onto the new carriage bolts for the other side.And we're just going to thread this flange nut onto our carriage bolt. And on our front bolt here, we're going to thread on a flange nut as well. We're just going to go ahead and leave them hand tight at this time because we do want it to be a little bit loose just so we can make any final adjustments. We're now going to repeat the same process over on the other side, to get the other side plate installed.We're now back up top and we went ahead and placed our rail back over our holes and everything. And the side plates we put on, if we look down, we'll be able to see straight through these slots and the side plates, where the ears go over the frame. We're going to use the smaller diameter carriage bolts that come in our kit, and these are going to drop down into each of the holes. One of the things you want to pay attention to is the corrugation here. We have some spacers that we're going to be using to ensure that we have constant metal to metal contact, and we don't crush any of the gaps here. So for this bolt here that we dropped down in the middle, the space is going to go underneath the bed. But for the ones that we have here on the sides, where it dips down, we're going to put the spacer underneath the rail right here and then drop our bolt down through it. We're going to repeat that for all the bolt holes.We're now underneath the vehicle and you can see the bolt that we had dropped down through the center. This is the spacers that we we're sliding in up top, underneath the rail. But since this is on a raised section, we're going to be sliding in here, on the bottom. And that is due to using these spacer plates that we're going to place on each of our carriage bolts here on the bottom. And we're going to follow those up with a flange nut. And we put that spacer here in the corrugation just to ensure that we don't crush anything when we are tightening it down.We'll now repeat this for the four remaining bolts in this rail. And they're located just above your frame rail. We'll also need to thread the nuts onto the carriage bolts that we dropped down on each side, these four corners that we did. These ones can be a bit tricky as there's not a lot of room to work above the frame and the bolts like to kind of push back up as you're working on them. If you've got an assistant on top to hold the bolts down for you, it can make things a little bit easier but you can also just kind of put a little bit of side pressure on the bolt, to keep it from pushing up as you're threading it on. We're going to repeat that for the other bolt on this side. And then the two bolts over on the other side.We're now in the back of the truck and we've got our 5th wheel in here. We're going to be using this to help us install our rear rail. It doesn't matter which 5th wheel you have, you just want to use it, so that way you can set the appropriate distance for the other rail. So we're going to go ahead and set our, 5th wheel now into the rail that we have installed. So we're just going to line up the slots until it drops down.We've got it in both there so that we can come up to the front here. We're just going to slide our rail up underneath of it, while lifting it up. Now we just want to line up those slots in the rail with the ears hanging down on the bottom of our 5th wheel until it falls into place. We can then take all of our pins and we're just going to slide them through. We don't need to clip them. Just helps make sure that when we install our rail, that it's going to be easier to get our pins to slide in and out, if we've got them in place to begin with.With our 5th wheel in place in our rail, we have it lined up where we need it to be now. So we're going to just repeat the same process we did to install the front rail by marking out the four corners and the center one towards the rear here, and then drilling those out to the same size as we did before. The only big difference between installing the rear rail here and the front rail is that instead of using the outermost holes, we're going to come in one set.We've now got all of our holes drilled out. So we're going to lift up on our 5th wheel and put it back into place, lining up all of the pegs again. Now that we've got to dropped down in there, we're going to put our pins back in and then we're going to install the hardware, just like we did on the front rail. Just want to pay attention to those raised and lowered sections and put those spacers in the appropriate location, whether they should go on the top or bottom to prevent from crushing the bed.And just like we did on the front rail, we're going to install the hardware. It's going to be the same type of hardware. We're going to have spacers for wherever we need to take up space, in this raised section. For our rear rail, they're going to be in raised sections for all of them all the way across. So when we place them all underneath, we're going to put our spacer on it and then we're going to secure it with a flange nut. Now you do have the option if this one falls out, you can just slide that up in afterwards, since it's got that little slot there. Now, you do have the option to lower down the spare tire, to make things a little bit easier. And there's also a heat shield here that can be bothersome, so you may want to consider lowering that down as well. It's not necessary, but it does free up a little bit of space.We can now go back and tighten down our hardware. For all of our underneath bolts, we're going to be using a three quarter inch socket. With the bolts underneath tightened down, we can then tighten down our side rails. We're going to use a fifteen, sixteen socket to do this. We can now go back and torque all of our hardware to the specifications found in our instructions.Now that we've got all of our hardware torqued down, you want to come back up top and just double check to make sure that your 5th wheel is going to come in and out of the rails easily. Because sometimes when you tighten them down, you can get it into a bind and it might get stuck in there. So just kind of give it a rock. But if we can get it up, in and out, nice and easy, then we are ready to put our pins in and secure them with the included clips. And that completes our installation of CURT's Custom Fit 5th Wheel Rail Kit on our 2015 GMC Sierra 2500.
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (218 Customer Reviews)
Install your fifth wheel trailer hitch in half the time with this custom bracket kit. Requires less drilling than universal kits and provides a custom fit for your vehicle. Includes everything you need for installation.If you do this yourself, definitely remove the wheel well liners and remove 3 of the 4 bolts holding the heat shield with one loosened to move it out of the way. Top front four nuts are the hardest to get started from under the truck. Start to finish 3 hours. Saved myself $500 for install
Great product.. better than my previous install on a 2006 Silverado w/separate brackets for each bolt for the Rails. This went in like a dream.. however, with that said... watching the video from etrailer on YT showing how to install this was extremely helpful... the "real life" install is no where near as easy as they show. The fuel tank and the bottom of the bed allow for about 5" of room to get you hand, arm and the bolts installed on the bottom of the bolts that come down from the rails. Very difficult. The passenger side also has the exhaust and a shield to contend with. Removal of the shield is a must, however the tight area between the frame rail and the underside of the bed... again, only allows for minimal accessability for the bolts. The only bolts that were able to be torqued were the bolts on the outside of the frame rails, otherwise all other bolts were only able to be torqued to grunt specs. Took about 3hrs, however it is way easier drilling only the 8 holes through the bed floor than into the frame... I would suggest re-tapping the threaded studs that are on the frame. I installed this on a 3 yrs old 2017, and I had a tap to do this. W/O the tap I think the bolts would not have gone in so easy AND they most likely would have been damaged from the rust and stuff laying in the holes.
Jerome C - 03/17/2021Box was delivered with a little damage and the contents of the hardware bag was loose in the box. After going through the parts list and realizing I was missing 1 block, we contacted etrailer and they shipped the replacement part immediately, we got it within 3 or 4 days. Install was a breeze after watching the video and fishing the bolts and blocks in the frame. Only took a couple hours total.
Installed on 2019 2500 just as instruction and have had no issues put bed mat ove just so things don't slide around when not towing 5th wheel
I feel that the installation video simplifies the process to much. Attaching the frame plates with the bolt fish wire was more difficult than the video showed. I am to blame for the first bolt. We started on the left side and fished the back bolt first. I did not check to see if the wire would go through both plate and bolt once threaded onto the bolt. I just placed the plate on the wire and then threaded the bolt onto the wire and pulled or tried to pull it through the frame hole. The wire was "bunched" on part of the bolt and would not feed through the frame and the plate holes. I stretched the wire to the point I thought I was going to lose the bolt in the frame. We ended up getting the bolt back out and using the other fish wire to feed this bolt through. We made sure we could fit both the plate and bolt through together before fishing it through the frame. Once we did one the other three went a lot easier but we only had one fish wire to use. I had watched the installation video several times and played it while we were working. The video is good but it makes the process seem to easy. I would like to see the video have more details about this process and have 4 fish wire instead of 2 or tell people you may want to have two more on hand for piece of mind.
Jeff L - 10/01/2018This is a great product, but the install time estimates are way off. I have been a mechanic in my own shop for 19 years and I didn’t remove the rear wheels or the spare tire (because) it wasn’t necessary on my truck. I have a lift in my shop and it still took me 6 hours to install it! Trying to hold the spacers while trying to get the nuts installed on the 8 outer through the bed bolts was ridiculous! Terrible place to get to, lots of bad words! I’m thinking that buying the custom kit versus the universal was a bad idea, I have installed both and it was no quicker with this kit and it was almost a hundred dollars higher. My install was on a 2013 2500hd.
Very happy with the quality of the rails, the hitches fit as they should. The only reason I did not give a five star as the kit was missing a couple of the bolts needed for the install. I had to call the technical hot line and they did send the bolts to me free of charge. The technical assistance was very good as well. They answer the phone promptly and were very courteous and helpful.
Excellent Product, amazing customer service. The fifth wheel hitch mounting kit has held up just as I would have expected. I will do business with Etrailer again anytime!
Last summer I made purchase of the A16 sliding 5th wheel hitch along with rails.the install took about six hours working by myself .following the enclosed instructions is important and saves time if you do it exactly as shown.I was very pleased with the delivery,it was prompt and no charge.that was great.the hitch is a slider which I think is important on a shortbed,could save damage to truck during maneuvers.my experience with etrailer has been really good and would recommend this company to anybody shopping for trailering equipment
Whew! Installing that Rail kit about kicked my butt! The reason why is all the trips I made from underneath the truck and back. The Rail kit is a very high Quality Product from Curt that fits perfectly in the bed of my truck. The hardware is also high quality. One downside is there isn't a lot of room to work as the gas tank on one side and the exhaust on the other side prevents easy access (gas tank in particular). It was very hard to get a wrench on the nuts unless you used a Gearwrench. After the install they are torqued to 110 ft-lb. The only way to do that was to put a 1 inch adapter on the torque wrench then put that in the open end of the gearwrench in the adapter. Then using a formula on line, convert that to what you have to ft-lb. Anyway It was worth it because I know I have a good product that will stand the test of time.
Excellent product, perfect fit for my vehicle, arrived a couple days before it was supposed to. I did not want an "aftermarket" look, which is why I ordered a kit designed specifically for my vehicle. I did take the time to remove the heat shield to gain better access to the installation bolts. The biggest challenge was installing and tightening the bolts that go through the bed; there is not a lot of room between the trucks frame and the bed of the truck. The most challenging bolts were the ones on the driver side closest to the cab of the truck due to the placement of the gas tank. Trailer wiring was plug-and-play, hardest part was drilling the 2" hole in the side of my truck bed.
This is the second one of these that I ordered from e trailer. The first one I got at the same time as the fifth wheel hitch. I install on my 2015 Silverado 2500HD. I traded that Silverado for a 2018 Silverado 3500 Z71. Kept the hitch had to leave the rails. Great product and not bad to install. Took about 2 hours. If I trade again, I will get third.
E-Trailer made the ordering process very easy. The rails arrived much faster than expected and they were in very good condition. The rails took much longer to install than expected, since I did not have a vehicle lift available, as they use in the installation videos. One of the rail mount nuts is particularly hard to access since it over the gas tank, and there is very little clearance for all eight nuts on my 2018 Silverado 2500HD. This makes it more challanging when you are laying under the truck. There is no way to use a torque wrench to tighten these 8 nuts due to the lack of clearance between the rail bracket and the truck frame. Otherwise, I am very happy with the product!
The hitch I ordered and received on time was as described. The instructions where we'll written and easy to understand, so the installation went smoothly. The customer service representative Paula S. Was very knowledgeable & helpful insuring that I had the correct kit for my application as well as the most economical solution for shipping and still meeting my timeline. Thank you etrailer and Paula S.
The installation kit fit perfect but take the time to move the spare tire and the heat shield out of the way to make it easier.
Kevin L - 10/23/2017The hitch has worked superbly. I would consider attaching a statement to warn of the fact that when the hitch is extended to the maximum length the tail gate may become an obstruction
This bracket and rail kit was the perfect fit for my 2011 Silverado. Made the install of my hitch a breeze and allowed me to be on the road with my new trailer in no time.
Any order that I have gotten have been on time and good quality. I have nothing but good things to say so keep doing the fantastic job that you guys do and I will keep ordering from these guys so thank you
Excellent fit came with all the proper parts and instructions
Seems to be a nice set. Installation wasn't anywhere near as easy as the video shows. Very difficult to put the washers and nuts on the bottom plate. I do a lot of my own work, this is certainly not for a novice.
Heavy steel construction. Went on without an issue. Everything fit like a glove. I would suggest the 10-bolt pattern as I did for extra strength and security.
Ron C - 05/15/2018Product fits well on my 2019 Silverado Duramax Diesel 2500. The installation of this product is somewhat difficult and takes more time than I thought. The front four nuts and bolts are extremely difficult to install. The instructions do not inform you to remove the passenger side heat shield and it is a must. I found multiple videos on-line that direct you to cut the heat shield out of place and to not reinstall the shield, bad advice. After the front four bolts are installed the balance of the installation went much easier. The installation only requires a couple wrenches and a drill, I highly recommend two people due to the installation of the front four nuts and bolts and a complete day for installation. Re-installation of the heat shield was a bit difficult but in my opinion worth the work.
Bought this with the Demco Hijacker auto-slide hitch. It fit my 2015 Chevy 2500 HD perfectly and is solid as a rock. etrailer shipped it quickly, and it arrived on time and undamaged. Excellent customer service.
Jim P - 09/05/2019I have a 2015 GMC 2500HD and the rail system fit my truck and hitch like a glove. It is a very stout rail system and will hold the weight you plan to pull, now the down side instructions where good but took a bit to figure out because they cover a few different year's and just because of my year truck I had to use a fishing wire (that was provided) to get hardware mounted rite but other then that it's straight forward. I recommend this product.
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