Blue Ox Trailer Hitch Receiver - Custom Fit - Class III - 2"

Video Transcript for Blue Ox Class III Trailer Hitch Installation Guide - 2021 Mazda CX-5

Hi, this is Scott with e-trailer. Today we're taking a look at and installing our Blue Ox hitch on our 2021 Mazda CX-5. Our Blue Ox hitch we have on our Mazda today is going to be a hidden cross tube design. Your cross tube's going to be hidden up behind your fascia, so you're not going to see that. All you're really going to see is just your receiver portion hanging down underneath of your rear fascia. Now this is gonna have a really good heavy duty coating on it, so it's gonna hold up to a long time of, again, scratches and rust and corrosion.

So that's a really good thing with these. And I really like the way this color on this one matches up with our bumper fascia here. It's kinda almost a flat color, so it blends in really nice. This hitch is gonna have a five-eighths pinhole opening. That's gonna hold in any of your accessories that you put in the back.

Now keep in mind, this hitch won't come with a pin and clip, so you may wanna pick one of those up here at etrailer. Another thing is a lot of your accessories, like your bike racks and cargo carriers will come with a pin and clip, and a lot of your bike racks now come with an anti-rattle pin that will come with them. It's just gonna have heavy duty welded-on chain loops. It's gonna accept either your S-style hook or your Clevis style hook. So either one of those are gonna work out for you if you're pulling a small trailer.

As far as our measurements go for this hitch, from the center of the pinhole out to the edge of the bumper, we're looking at right at about two and a quarter inches. With that measurement, you'll be able to decide on if any of your accessories that fold up or stow away will make any contact with the back of your vehicle. Now from the upper inside lip of our receiver to the ground, we're looking at right at around 14 inches. And with that measurement, you'll be able to decide on if you plan on pulling a small trailer, what type of ball mount you may need for that. And it will also help you figure out if you need any rise of the shank of either your bike racks or your cargo carriers for clearance.

As far as weights go for this hitch, this hitch is gonna have a tongue weight rating of 675 pounds. That's gonna be the weight of your bike racks loaded down with your bikes or your cargo carrier loaded down with all of your gear, pushing down on the lower portion of the hitch itself. Now for a gross trailer weight rating, we're looking at 4,500 pounds. That's gonna be the weight of your trailer and everything that you have on that. Now keep in mind, it's always a good idea to take a look in your owner's manual and make sure you're not exceeding any of the maximum towing capabilities listed in there. If you have any questions or comments about this hitch for your Mazda CX-5, you can always leave a question or comment down below in the comment section, or you can get ahold of one of our experts here at e-trailer. They'd be glad to help you out. Now as far as installation goes, this one can be a little bit tricky. It's a little bit tight getting it in there, but it's something you can definitely handle yourself. If you don't have the time or the tools to do it yourself, you can always take a look at our dealer 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're gonna have this little panel right here behind our bumper fascia, and we're gonna have two little push clips in there. Just wanna take a flat head screwdriver, and we're just gonna get those popped out. And those should pull right out for you. Now we can remove this little panel. (panel banging) It's gonna pop in there with little clips as well. Just pull down on that, pop that out, and we'll set that aside. What we're gonna need to do next is lower our exhaust to give us a little room to get our hitch in place. So we're gonna have four isolators. We're gonna have two on each side we're gonna need to pop off. We're gonna have two on this side and two over here on our driver's side. So what I wanna do is take a cam buckle strap and I'm gonna support our exhaust with my strap. So that way when I break those loose, we're not gonna damage anything upstream on our exhaust. That's gonna allow me to raise and lower it a little bit easier. With that in place, pull that tight. Now we can remove our isolators. For our isolators, to get these off a little bit easier, I like to take a little bit of soapy water. I just have some dish soap and water, and what I do is I'll pull down on my exhaust a little bit and spray a little bit of that water up in there on both sides of my isolator. We'll do that on all of these. Now, I'm gonna use isolator pliers to get these off of here. You can use a pry bar or whatever you have, but the main goal is to just get those off the end. And just rotate them up out of the way. With our isolators removed, I just wanna hold up on my exhaust, and now I'll let off my cam buckle strap a little bit, and that's gonna bring it down carefully. Now, underneath of our frame, we're gonna have this kind of a rubberized coating here that goes around our access hole. You can use a putty knife or a wide screwdriver or something like that to just scrape this off. What I'm gonna do is use my oscillating cutting tool, and I'm just gonna go ahead and get all of that off of there. I like to get all of it off the bottom flat and off the sides, and a little bit towards the back here. (tool whirring) Now you may end up with some scratches and bare metal up in here, so what I like to do is come back through with a little spray paint and just get some paint on that, and that'll protect it. (spray paint hissing) Now on the side of our frame on both sides where our hitch is gonna mount up, we're gonna have this little sticker here in the front. You're gonna have one here. Just wanna scrape that. Sometimes if you pop a hole in it, you can go ahead and get a lot of that out of the way. You can just pull on that and get that out. Just wanna get access to that hole right there. Now the one in the back, you're gonna have another sticker right back here. It's kinda hard to see if it's painted over, but same thing with this one. This one's gonna have a weld nut on the inside of that. That's where our bolt's gonna screw into, so we wanna get the sticker out of the way on those. Now anywhere you see any more of this rubberized sealant, we wanna get that out of the way as well, just take a screwdriver and just run up that, and just get that out of the way. It's gonna allow our hitch to lay flat against our frame. Once we have that out of the way, we're gonna go right here and we're gonna have this little plastic tab that's kinda like an electrical connection holder. Just gonna take our clip tool, or you can take your screwdriver, get under that. We'll pop that out, move that out of the way as well. Now, there's a couple different ways you can do this. On our vehicle, our rear-most hole just has just a hole. There is no weld nut in there. You will have hardware included. If you do have a weld nut, you can just go that route. But with ours, we're gonna have to fish wire in our hardware. So we're gonna have our spacer block, we're gonna have our carriage bolt, and we're gonna have our fish wire, which is just a wire with a coiled end on it. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take our fish wire, you can put a little bend in it, and we're gonna go through our hole that we're gonna be running our hardware through. We'll go through that, and then down through our access hole just underneath of that. We'll take our spacer block, run that on over our coiled wire, take our carriage bolt, thread that onto our fish wire. Let's thread that down until we get right about there. Now we'll take our spacer block, run that up into our access hole and push that in. As far as you can, you may have to push that up in a little bit to get it to go. It can be a little bit tight. Seems to work better if you go towards the front of the vehicle with that. Then follow that up with your carriage bolt. Pull both through our access hole and make sure we have our hardware all the way through. And we are gonna leave our fish wire on there. That's gonna help us when we get our hitch lifted into position, because we'll need to push this bolt in, and then pull it back through with our fish wire into our hitch. Now for our forward hole, since that is a weld nut inside of our frame, we're gonna be using our bolt that comes in the kit, and we'll have a conical tooth washer. When we get these together, we wanna have the teeth facing towards the hitch when we get these installed. Now, if your Mazda has the threaded or weld nut in the rear-most hole, you'll go ahead and use this same hardware configuration. Now with an extra set of hands, my friend Jesse's gonna help me lift our hitch into position. What we wanna do is just run our fish wires through our hitch from the inside out. Now we'll just lift our hitch up into position. If your exhaust gets in the way, you can always just drop it down a little bit more. Then you just wanna line your hitch up with your holes as best you can. It's a little tricky to get our hitch into position, but once we get our holes lined up, we should be able to just pull our hardware through. And if your hardware gives you any trouble going in, you can always reach in behind and get to that access hole and push it through. We'll go ahead and pull off our pull wire and start our nut on the end of our carriage bolt. Now we'll come back through and snug down our hardware. (tool whirring) And the one with the weld nut in the back, we'll go ahead and snug that down as well. (tool whirring) With all of our hardware snugged down, we'll come back through with our torque wrench and we'll torque down all of our hardware to the specifications listed in our instruction manual. If you don't have a torque wrench, you can pick one up here at etrailer. We do have some options available, or you can take a look at your local auto parts store. You should be able to rent one there. (tool clanking) (tool beeping) After we have everything torqued down, we'll come back through and get our exhaust put back in place. It always helps getting our isolators put back into position. We take a little bit of our soapy water again to spray down our pins and the insides of our isolators, and that's gonna help them slide back in place. After everything's been torqued down, we'll go ahead and remove our cam buckle strap, and that will do it for our installation of our Blue Ox hitch on our 2021 Mazda CX-5. I'm Scott with e-trailer, and thanks for watching.