Video Transcript for Step-By-Step Install Curt Custom Base Plate Kit - 2022 Ford Bronco

Hi everyone, Jesse here with etrailer. Today we'll be taking a look at, and I'll show you how to install the Curt Custom Fit baseplate on our 2022 Ford Bronco. There's really five main components to look into whenever setting up your vehicle to be flat towed, the first one being the base plate. This is the structural mounting point on the towed vehicle for which really everything else is going to connect. Then we have our tow bar, which is the physical link between towed vehicle and motor home. We have our diode wiring, which this is going to keep you safe and legal out there on the road by sending a signal from the taillights on your motor home to the taillights on the towed vehicle to get those lights to function properly.

We also have a braking system, which is also going to keep you safe and legal while traveling all 50 states. And what that does is allows you to not just rely on the brakes on the motor home, but also utilize the brakes on the towed vehicle to come to a safe stop. And last, we have our safety cables. These are here in case of a catastrophic disconnect. If anything in our system we inchesre to fail, then those will hold everything together so you can get pulled over safely.

Here's a close look at what our base plate looks like when you're hooked up and ready to tow. The base plate doesn't come with any kind of mounting brackets for your six pole wiring or your breakaway cable. So you will have to kind of do something custom like I did. I just built a bracket that bolts up to the vehicle. But our base plate here, we have loops for our safety cables.

It's pretty easy to get those off as far as access goes. And then our tow bar here, we are using a Blue Ox tow bar. This is going to work with almost any brand out there. You'll just have to look into whether you need an adapter end for your tow bar to work or not. And then these arms here are removable, so you can get almost a factory look whenever you're not flat towing.

What you'll do is just pull this pin out and rotate this a quarter turn and pull it out. Now you have a pretty clean look for when you're just driving around town. Really, that's about all there is to it. As I said, this is really just the structural mounting point for all of your other flat tow components. But if you have any questions about if this base plate is right for you or really any questions about any flat tow components, reach out to us. We deal with these all the time and we'd be happy to help you out. When it comes to the installation with this base plate, it's honestly easy compared to other base plates out there because essentially all you do is drop your skid plate down here if you have one and then it's going to bolt up to some brackets that are right down here. Even though that sounds like a pretty easy process, you're most likely installing other flat tow components at the same time. So I'd understand if you're not looking to tackle that all yourself and check out our installer locator. You can find someone local to you that would be happy to get you set up. If you are looking to see how this gets installed and follow along and I'll walk you through the process. To begin our installation, you'll want to first remove your skid plate that's going to be down here. It's usually just held in by a handful of 10 millimeter bolts. We didn't have a skid plate on our vehicle, so we're just going to skip that step and move on to removing this bracket here. This is held in by two 15 millimeter bolts. (drill buzzing) We can get our base plate up into place. These are side specific, so just make sure everything lines up. Your safety cable hook is going to go on the inside and you also have this opening here for this rubber stop. So get that all lined up. Then we're using the factory bolts. I did reapply some blue thread locker and we just have that on an extension so we can get it up in place. It's kind of tricky to hold everything, but get that pushed up and start threading it in. Then we can tighten these down and we'll just repeat that same process on the other side. (drill buzzing) Now we can get our side brackets mounted up. There's going to be two holes on the outside of your base plate here and then two holes on the frame of the vehicle. So once again, side specific, just kind of mock them up and figure out which one is which. We'll get that lined up and then we'll send one of our half inch bolts to our base plate and the bracket, get a flat washer, then a split washer, and then your nyloc nut. We'll do the same thing with the hardware above that. We'll take the coiled end of our fish wire, feed that up through and out this opening. Once you have that out of there, we'll take a 7/16 flat washer, 7/16 bolt, push that up, get that to slot down. This back one is a little tricky. You have to kind of get the washer position before you can pull the bolt the rest of the way down, but eventually that'll come out and line up with our hole there. Once you have both those bolts dropped down, we can start threading on a flange nut to each of them. Now we can tighten everything down. These two bolts are going to be using an 11/16 inch socket. (drill buzzing) Then our bolts on the side will be a three quarter inch socket. And you'll also need a wrench to hold onto the nut, so I'll grab that. (drill buzzing) We need to torque everything down, so you will need a torque wrench. And then what I did was just put my three quarter inch wrench and kind of locked it into the body here. That's going to help me be able to get up to the high torque spec rating. And once I have it torqued down, I'll just have to use a pry bar to take that wrench out. Once you have everything torqued down, we can move on to our permanent safety cables. These are here just in case of a catastrophic disconnect to kind of hold everything together. So what we need is to have this wrapped around a sturdy piece of the frame and then connect it to our base plate with this quick link here. So what I'll do is feed this up above our frame and then get this to go between our frame and our charge pipe here. Pull that down. And with our quick link, we'll just send it through that hole in the bottom of our base plate, get both ends of the safety cable through the quick link and we'll just tighten that down. All that's left is to get the rest of your flat tow components installed. Otherwise, that's going to do it for our look at and installation of the Curt Custom Fit Base Plate on our 2022 Ford Bronco.