Video Transcript for Pro Series 25K Gooseneck Plate Installation - 2008 Ford F-350

Today in our 2008 Ford F-350, we'll be installing the Pro Series 25K Gooseneck Plate for Fifth Wheel Rails, part number 49080. Now a great feature about having this adapter verses an under-bed gooseneck mount, is if you have a lot of trailers that you have to tow that are either gooseneck or fifth wheel, you are able to do that easily just by pulling the pins, removing it, and switching out your adapter to a fifth wheel. Removing it is as simple as pulling our clip, pulling our pin out, doing that on all four corners, and lifting it out. Once we have it back in place, when we're hooking it onto a different trailer or hooking our gooseneck back up, reinsert the pin, reinstall the clip just like that. Now you may notice right here we have our loops that go through here where we can wrap our safety chains through and connect our safety chains from our trailer together. We have one here on the front and one at the back because this adapter, if we need to bring our trailer closer to the cab of our truck, you notice it's offset. We can just flip it 180 degrees and reinstall our clips. Now this Pro Series Gooseneck Adapter has a 25,000 pound max gross trailer weight rating and a 6,250 pound max gross tongue weight rating. Here's what our gooseneck adapter plate comes with. Obviously we have our gooseneck adapter plate here, which comes with a 2-5/16 inch ball. When you flip this around you just want to make sure your ball is not behind your rear axle.

You either want it above the rear axle center line or towards the forward position. You do not want it behind your rear axle at all. This adapter plate's nice because if you are primary towing fifth wheel trailers, but you need to tow a gooseneck trailer occasionally, you can just remove your fifth wheel hitch leaving your rails in place, drop this down onto your existing rails, and secure it with your pins and your clips just like you would your fifth wheel adapter. Now when we're installing this, we do need to drill two additional holes for added stability through our rails. We have two carriage bolts and two spacer plates here, which will prevent our bed from crushing, conical tooth washers, two nuts, and two lock washers. This is just so it will strength our rails so it can support the extra downward pressure of the gooseneck ball going down. As you can see, we already have existing fifth wheel rails in place. Now, in order to properly install this, we need to make sure we center our plate into the rails like so.

Now, you may notice that it's not dropping down in perfectly square. Towards the back here you can see that our rail is slightly off. That's not a big deal. All we need to do is loosen one of the rails a little bit and slide this into position where it can be lifted in and out easily. We'll center it into the front rail towards the cab of the truck, and we'll adjust our rear rail. You can see on our driver's side here our two bolts that are dropped down through our back rail.

We'll go ahead and loosen the nuts up. We don't need to loosen them all the way, just a few turns. With our driver's side loose we'll go loosen the passenger side ones now. All right with our bolts loosened now, we can tap our rail forward a little bit. All right, now that our plate sits down nice and flush in our rails, and lifts out nice and easily, and goes down nice and easily, we can re-tighten these bolts back up on the rails, then remove our plate, and drill our final two holes. Okay, we'll repeat the same process on the driver's side. All right with all of our bolts snugged down we'll torque them to spec.

All right, with these two bolts torqued on the passenger side, we'll repeat the same process on the driver's side. Now that we have our bolts torqued down and rail positioned, you can see how our plate fits nicely into our rails. We'll go ahead and lift it off so we can drill our holes. Now the kit comes with two bolts, one for each rail, but you notice there's two center holes in each rail. You need to do the one which is closest to the bed support underneath the bed. In our case today, that is going to be the forward hole on both of our rails. We'll drill a small pilot hole first. We can enlarge that to a half inch diameter hole. You can do that one of two ways. You can use a half inch diameter drill bit, or you can use a step bit. Our case today we're going to use a step bit. We'll do the same for the other rail. Now the front rail, there's two layers of bed that you have to drill through so when you feel the drill bit go down and then stop, don't worry just keep going. Now we'll drop down our bolts and we'll install our hardware underneath the bed. We have our spacer plates here between our raised section of our bed and they will wrap around our bolt and these will help keep our bolts, when they're tightened, from crushing our bed. We'll take our conical tooth washer, with our teeth facing towards the bed, a lock washer, and then our hex nut. We'll snug that on down. Same for the other bolt. Tighten these down then we'll torque them to spec. All right with our new middle bolts in place and torqued down to spec, we can re-install our gooseneck adapter. All right with our gooseneck adapter in, we can now take our pins and install them to secure it into place. We put our pin in, install our clip making sure this side faces up and this is against the rail. With that clip in place our pin is now secure. We'll do the same for the other three locations. That completes our installation of the Pro Series 25K Gooseneck Plate for Fifth Wheel Rails, part number 49080 on our 2008 Ford F-350. Etrailer.com .