Roadmaster Crossbar-Style Base Plate Kit - Removable Arms

Video Transcript for Setting up the Roadmaster Crossbar-Style Base Plate Kit on a 2024 GMC Canyon

Hey everyone, Ryan here at Etrailer. Today on our 2024 GMC Canyon, we're gonna be showing you how to install the Roadmaster Crossbar Style Base Plate Kit. But before we do that, let's just take a minute, we'll check this one out and make sure it's gonna be the right setup for you. I would like to address one of the big questions that a lot of people ask in regards to being able to set up their Canyon to be flat towed down the road. And that's what parts am I gonna need. And there's five main components or major components.

You'll have your base plate, the tow bar, your safety cables, your diode wiring, and a supplemental braking system. And then there's a few other things I like to recommend for the Canyon. One of 'em being a battery charge line kit. With these Canyons, you also have to disconnect the battery when you flat tow. So I like to use the automatic battery disconnect switch and then depending on what braking system you end up going with, for example the Stay-IN-Play Duos like we have here today with the Roadmaster InvisiBrake, you may need to pick up a Roadmaster Stoplight Switch as well.

And when it comes to the base plate, this is how it's gonna look on the front of your Canyon and I don't really think it can get much better to be honest with you. It just comes out of the openings here that your tow hooks we inchesre originally in. So you know, it doesn't really catch your attention by any means or anything like that. Does a pretty good job of blending in. I also really like too that they include brackets like this one for example, to allow you to mount up some of your other components like your wiring connector, which is here.

And then on this side of the base plate, they give you a bracket that's already built onto it to allow you to mount up your breakaway switch for your braking system. So that's super convenient, you know, you don't have to bother with trying to find a good spot or anything like that. But more importantly, how all this is set up, you're not gonna have to really modify the front of your Canyon at all. It's already gonna utilize openings that are already there so you don't have to trim and cut up the front of your truck. When you are ready to hook up to your motor home, you can take your removable arms and these are just going to slide into the base plate and lock down.

Now with that said, this is gonna be a crossbar style base plate, all right, meaning once you put these in, you'll have a bar that runs across the top of it like that and then you can hook your tow bar up to it. This is gonna work with the vast majority of the Roadmaster tow bars out there as well as a lot of the other manufacturers, they're getting real good now. Let's say if you had a Blue Ox tow bar that you like already and you want to keep it but you want this base plate, you know you can get adapter in, so it'll let you change 'em out to this Roadmaster style and allow you to pair it up. But something to think about with this crossbar style. All right, the base plate is only gonna come with this arm portion. You're not gonna get these brackets that bolt to the arms or the actual crossbar. So you can always grab this stuff separately if you don't happen to have it already. Our neighbor here today, it's been flat towing several vehicles for a while and already had this on hand. It's what he's used to and so that's what he wanted to keep going with, which is definitely understandable. In some cases, you know, it's a couple extra parts that you have to deal with, but in some cases, it's not a bad thing. So let's say for example if you happen to have a motor home that sits up really high, by using the crossbar style, you know, it's gonna raise that attachment point up several more inches. So if your motor home's high and the hitch on the motor home's up real high, having this higher attachment point might eliminate the need to use a high low adapter to keep your tow bar straight. If you're looking for something a little more simple in design and and less parts or don't really have to worry about that type of thing, then the other option would be to go with the direct connect style, which is usually what I recommend in a lot of cases. But the crossbar style does have a place, but with the direct connect style, you're gonna have arms that look like this, all right and no crossbar or anything like that. And with these, you put 'em into the base plate like that, lock 'em down and your tow bar would attach directly to it. As far as what models the base plate is gonna fit, it's gonna fit all of 'em, with a couple exceptions. If you happen to have the AT4X, so like the beefed up, off-road style edition, it is not compatible with that. Or if you happen to have the underbody camera system, it's not compatible with that either. But the standard AT4 like we have here today works just fine. The Denalis, it sounds like a lot of people are using 'em, you know, even more on the more base model type trucks even as well. So should be in pretty good shape there. But ultimately at the end of the day, you know, whatever base plate you go with, it's gonna look good when you're not hooked up and pretty easy to use and it's nice you don't have to chop up the front of your truck to get these parts on. Now as far as the installation goes, putting the actual base plate itself on really isn't too bad. It utilizes a lot of factory attachment points and things like that, so nothing too crazy there. The most difficult or time consuming part would be getting that fascia off. You know, it's really tight, a lot of plastic and stuff so just be careful, take your time and hopefully, and along the way, I can give you a couple pointers to make that a little bit easier on you. And if this is something you just don't feel comfortable doing or don't have the time or place to work on it, I definitely understand that, you can always check out our dealer locator and hopefully that can kind of get you going in the right direction as far as finding a shop that can help you out with this. But with that in mind, why don't we go ahead and get started installing this one now. To begin our installation, we're gonna be here at the front of our Canyon and you can go ahead and pop the hood. We're gonna have to remove our front fascia. So we'll start with removing the four fasteners up along this edge here. So we'll have two on each side. The fasteners are gonna be T15 Torx bit styles, so we'll grab our bit here, get 'em both removed, and from this point on, whatever we do to one side of our truck, we'll also do to the other side because it'll be set up the same way. Moving underneath the front of our vehicle on each side, we're gonna have three T15 Torx bit screws. So go ahead and pull those out. (tool buzzes) Moving to your wheel wells now, we're gonna have more Torx bit screws, along the edge, we're gonna have a total of five of them and definitely helps if you turn your wheel in or out one way or the other, give you more room. But we'll go ahead and just work our way up here and get all these pulled out. (tool buzzes) This one up here is kind of tricky to see. You'll just have to kind of go by feel, further down in the wheel well, there's gonna be four more T15 fasteners, Get 'em all removed here. (tool buzzes) Once you get all those removed, you can take your fender liner, just kind of pull it out up till about, till about there. Since we're gonna be working in this area, kind of prying on it, I took some painter's tape, put it around the seams, that way we don't scratch anything up but we're gonna have to partly remove this fender trim here. And so if you kind of just start to pull down and out on it, there's some fasteners behind there and they're kind of hard to get to, to be honest. So you can just work your way around and then if you come in from the back, you can get to a couple of 'em. Once I get this more free, I'll show you what I'm talking about here. You can pull out on it and what I was doing, this push pin, you coming from the back, you can kind of squeeze it with your fingers while you're pulling out on it. It'll allow it to release and we can just work our way up here and as we go, and as you get you know this removed further and further, you can continue to kind of work the wheel wall liner back, to allow you to get your hand in there and actually get to those fasteners. You want to remove your wheel well trim to about here. I just took a piece of foam, kind of stuffed it in there to help keep it pulled away from our vehicle. And we're doing this, that way we can get access to this fastener right here and we're gonna go ahead and remove that. It is also a T15 Torx bit head, super tight, so as long as you can kind of break it loose and then you can usually just grab your bit with your hand and get it completely removed. Back in the wheel well, you know, if you just continue to kind of push your liner out of the way, that will expose these two T15 screws right here holding the fascia to this bracket. So we'll pull both those out. Just over here on the passenger side, we're gonna have an electrical connector that we need to disconnect. Depending on your model you may have two, another one right next to it, but we just have this one. So what I'm gonna do is take a little trim tool, there's a push pin, kinda holding it in, I'll release it. And then to disconnect this, there's a red tab, push down on it and then if you kind of push 'em together more and push down on the center there, you can release it. Moving to the front of our vehicle on each side here, inside of these little openings back little ways, you're gonna have a 10 millimeter head bolt. So if you grab an extension and of course your socket, what I like to do in the socket is take a little paper towel, put it in there, that way it'll kind of grab the bolt and when we go to remove it, way less likely to fall out and get lost. So that's what we're gonna do. Here's a better look at that fastener and we'll do what we talked about here. (tool buzzes) Hopefully have to kind of finesse it out. If you do drop it, it's not a huge deal but probably easier just to do it this way. Now with an extra set of hands, what you can do, you know, once you kind of start working everything apart, you can grab the corner of the fascia here and get to about this point on each side and you'll work everything free and get our fascia removed and set off to the side. When you are pulling this fascia off, you know it's gonna be kind of tight, you know, that's why we were working it back and forth to kind of loosen everything up and you know you might have to take, you know, a little bit of pressure. You know ours came off relatively easy but you might have to pull straight on it and that's because there's a lot of clips, classic fasteners kind all over the place that are holding this on. If a couple of 'em end up staying on the front of the vehicle, you wanna remove 'em, I'm just taking a pair of pliers, kinda squeezing 'em in, pulling 'em out and then you want to reinstall 'em back on the fascia, right, that way when we go to put the fascia back, they'll be connected already and actually slide right into place. You can get our tow hooks removed now and there's two bolts holding in, of course, you got a nut on the other side and we're gonna use 18 millimeter wrench to hold the nut from spinning and an 18 millimeter socket, (tool buzzes) pull those out. (tool buzzes) Let's go ahead, get our tow hooks removed as we will not be reinstalling them. If your truck happens to have the shutters on the lower grill like ours does, you will have to remove this faster here on each side, it is a seven millimeter and pretty tight so you almost have to use a box wrench here to get it removed. Can remove our bumper beam now. So on each side, you have three 15 millimeter head bolts (tool buzzes) and I got the three on the other side out already. So when you go to take this last one out, make sure you support it a little bit. You should be able to work this off and set it to the side. Looks like in our case actually, we'll have an electrical connector we need to disconnect. Ideally you'd do this beforehand but this is something I missed. I'm just gonna put a bolt back in to keep this supported so I can get to this here. This connector is similar to the other one. There's a red tab, I'm just using a small screwdriver 'cause it's pretty small there but push down on the center and release it. We should be able to get this removed. I just pulled those other two out that I put back in and we will completely remove it from our truck here. Take our base plate now. And these are side specific so make sure to check your instructions, make sure you got the right one, but pretty easy way to tell the safety chain opening there. That should be facing towards the outside of the truck. These two holes are gonna line up with these two holes where our tow hooks originally were. Slide that in place and then you'll take your factory tow hook bolt and they give you a flat washer and put that on, push it through. Same thing here. We can move to the outside of the bolt where we can get the rest of our hardware. We'll take another flat washer and then the factory nut and just get it started a couple of threads for the time being. Be sure now to take some red Loctite and put it on the threads of the hardware and we're gonna use red Loctite for all of the fasteners that we're gonna use to secure the base plate and I'll tighten 'em up pretty much all the way by hand. And what I'm looking to do here, 'cause the bumper beam is more or less gonna sandwich the base plate into position and if we just blindly tighten it down, you know, the holes might not line up as good as we want 'em too. So ours are off just a little bit. So what I'm gonna do is take a pry bar and hold it into position like that and then snug up (tool buzzes) those tow hook bolts (tool buzzes) And that way everything will stay in position, making it easier to get our bumper beam and those fasteners back in. We'll grab our bumper beam, of course, once you get both sides of your base plate on, wind this back up. Take that factory hardware, put your Loctite on it and we'll get all of them started hand tight. With everything in, you can take your 15 millimeter and snug all the hardware down. (tool buzzes) I wanna make sure to come back with a torque wrench now and torque all the hardware down to the amount specified the instructions. I'm gonna start with the bumper beam bolts and then we can change our sockets and do these factory tow hook bolts there. Now that we have everything torqued down, what I've done is came back and put those 10 millimeter head bolts back in that we removed when we had the fascia on. Just easier to get to now, you know, with it out of the way, I plugged our electrical connector back in for our lower shutters and reinstalled those two seven millimeter head screws. And at this point, it'd be a great time to, you know, start setting up some of your other flat towing components like your braking system or your wiring. And I say it because of the fascia removed, you know, we have a lot more room to work so that's exactly what I'm gonna do and once we have that wrapped up, we can, you know, revisit this and work on getting the fascia reinstalled. I got our other components installed on the front of our truck and now we're ready to get the fascia reinstalled. They do give you this electrical bracket here, which is pretty convenient. I'm gonna utilize it, it's gonna be on the driver's side and go through that opening there. And so we'll remove these two screws, this is 7 millimeter head and put that in place, and then simply just re-secure the screws. When you set up your other components, particularly your diode wiring and if you're doing a charge line, make sure when you route those wires over here to put 'em through the bracket, you know, before you get your fascia completely put back on and make sure you give yourself plenty of length to work with too. So just kind of a tech tip there. So we'll get that set up here, get the fascia put back into place and resecured the opposite way that we removed it. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Roadmaster Crossbar Style Base Plate Kit on our 2024 GMC Canyon.