Video Transcript for Installation Guide for the Draw-Tite Sportframe Trailer Hitch Receiver on a 2015 Honda Civic

Hi there, Civic owners. Today on your 2015 Honda Civic, we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install Draw-Tite's 1 1/4-inch trailer hitch receiver. This is a Class I 1 1/4 by 1 1/4-inch receiver. And here you can see it installed on the vehicle. The cross tube is gonna be a little bit visible, but it tucks up pretty nicely underneath and your Civic already sits pretty low, so you're really only gonna notice the receiver here at the back. And it's a nice small receiver that's gonna be great for your accessories, such as bike racks and very small cargo carriers potentially as well.

But this is really gonna be great for getting those bikes to your destination. You'll secure your accessories to your hitch using a half-inch hitch pin and clip. Now, one doesn't come included with the hitch, but we've got plenty of available here at etrailer, and I also would recommend locking ones to protect your investments. On bottom, we have loop-style safety chain loops with a very large opening that should accommodate just about every shape, size, and style of safety chain. Our little one has no problem.

And our big guy here also has no problem. This hitch features a 200-pound tongue weight, which is the force going down on top of the receiver. And this should be great for a two-bike platform rack loaded up. The rating here for your tongue weight of 200 pounds is any accessory you've got in there, so that includes your bike rack and any bikes that you put on it, so it can add up pretty quick. It also features a 2,000-pound gross towing capacity, and that's how much you can pull behind it.

And that's gonna be enough if you've got a really small utility trailer if you need to get a little bit of work done, or maybe you've got a hot dog cart you wanna bring around. Now, as always, I recommend that you verify in your vehicle's owner's manual and ensure you don't exceed any of its towing capacities. Now, I've got some measurements for you to help you when deciding on accessories. From the center of our hitch pin hole to the edge of our rear bumper, we're looking at right at about 4 1/2 inches. And this is important when determining if your accessories will contact the bumper when placed into the receiver, and if you can put them in the upright storage position without contacting the bumper.

And from the ground to the top inside edge of our receiver tube, it measures right at about 12 inches. This is important when determining if you need a drop, a rise, or a raised shank on your accessories. And since this one does sit so low, I definitely recommend a raised shank on your accessories. Now, that we've covered some of the features of our hitch, why don't you follow along with us in the shop and we'll show you how to get it installed. It is a relatively easy hitch to put on. We are gonna have to trim a couple of components and lower down the exhaust a little bit, but it won't take that long. This is something you could probably do in your garage in about an hour and a half, maybe two hours, depending on the tools you have available and how high you can lift the vehicle up. 'Cause the shield underneath is kinda big, and an extra set of hands could also help you get your hitch up here a little bit faster to save some time. We'll begin our installation underneath the vehicle. We'll need to lower down some components, so we can get our hitch up. That's gonna include our exhaust, our heat shield and our cover here. We're gonna start with the exhaust. To get that out of the way, it'll rest on our suspension here, so we don't need to worry about supporting it. So we're just gonna take some spray lubricant, put it on the hanger here at the back. And then we'll use a pry bar to just pry that off of there. So back into one of the other holes. Now that we've got it loose from that one, we're just gonna work our way forward, remove the next one here. And then depending on the room that we've got, we may or may not remove one more further, but we'll take this one off and see what kind of room we've got. So this is gonna be very similar to how we took off the other one, just gonna pry it off as well. Sometimes it's almost easier to just do it with your hands depending on where you can pry. That spray lubricant usually does a pretty good job of assisting you. Sometimes you need to hit it from both sides. I'll pry it again. There it goes. And we're sitting on our suspension now, so there's no reason to remove any further forward because it's not gonna come down any further than that anyway. So now we can take out the heat shield. So we can move it out of the way to get to our fasteners. There's four fasteners that hold it in place. We've got two there in the back of the vehicle. We'll have another one here. And there's another one up here as well. The one located here is gonna be a bit of a trick to get to. You can see it's kind of covered. So we're gonna take out the other ones first, then we can probably bend the heat shield over a little bit out of the way to get to that one. I'll take that 10 millimeter socket and get these out of here. Now that last one there, after looking at it, this whole panel has to come down. So we're gonna take this panel down and then we'll come back to that last fastener. To lower down this panel, we're gonna remove the pushpins around the outer perimeter here. So you can see them there, there and there there's about four of them that run around, maybe five. To remove these, we're gonna take our screwdriver. We're just gonna push it in between the little opening there, and we're gonna give it a little bit of a twist. And that'll pop that center out of there. And we usually give it a little bit of a grab and a wiggle and pull it to pull up the rest of the way out. We'll repeat that for all the remaining fasteners that are on here. Then on the other side of our panels towards the front of the vehicle and we're gonna have some nuts or some bolts we're gonna need to remove. There's a 10 millimeter socket again. It's gonna take this one off here, kind of just to the inside of the wheel on the driver's side. And then if we head towards the middle, it's actually on the panel that's just in front of the rear panel, but those fasteners will also go through some little ears on this panel, so we need to get those out as well. We can now pull down on our panel. We're just gonna pull out kinda slightly on this to get it to clear there. Pull it straight towards the rear. If you get that out of the way, we can set that aside. And now we've got access to our single bolt there. We're just gonna zip that out of there. And we'll set this aside as well. Now we're gonna go ahead and put some of our hardware into place. Here at the back on your tow loop, you're gonna have a small U-bolt that's gonna drop down around it. Now we're gonna be raising our hitch into position. Now this is where you got a couple options. If you've got a friend with you, then you guys could easily lift this up and either start these, or you can do the fasteners that's gonna be over there. If you're by yourself, that's how I'm gonna show you how to do it if you're all home alone, we're gonna raise it up and get these started, so that way the weight's gonna be supported by this so we can get the side ones in all by ourself. So now we're gonna raise our hitch into position, and it's kind of strange how it's gotta go around here. Our hitch bar here needs to go above the exhaust, but below the attachments so we can get those back into place. The other side there on the driver's side is really not a big deal at all. There's nothing really in the way over there. So now we're gonna lift this up. Lining up our U-bolts with the holes in our hitch, just like that. And then we'll get our nut started on our U-bolt here. And that'll support the weight of our hitch so that way we can get the other fasteners installed. Next, we're gonna get our side fasteners in place, so take your bolt, put your conical tooth washer on it with the teeth facing towards the hitch. And we're gonna take our handle nut here. Our bolt's gonna go up through this hole, into the frame here, and it's gonna thread into this handle nut. So we're gonna hold this up here at relatively where that hole is, and then come back here. This is our access hole. We're gonna bend it at about this point. So that way we know when we go up through the access hole here, it's gonna lean forward, kind of rest right there with that hole. Now we'll just tip our hitch up a little bit here. Line it up in that hole. Maybe adjust our handle nut to fit, and then get this into position. Now this can be pretty tricky to do, so we're gonna probably take our one hand here and kind of like, force the hitch up with the one hand, stick our bolt through there, and then try to hold our handle nut in place as well so that way we can get it started. And once we get this one over here, we'll repeat the same process over on the other side. Now this can be a little tricky with our exhaust and everything here, and it's pretty tight on space, but you should be able to get it in here as well. We can now go back and tighten down our hardware. For our smaller bolts, we're gonna use a 14 millimeter socket and tighten these down. You want to kind of go back and forth to tighten them down evenly. And then for our larger hardware, we're gonna use a 19 millimeter socket. And then we can go back and torque our hardware to the specifications outlined in your instructions. If you need a torque wrench, we have them available here from Performance Tools in varying sizes. For this one, the smaller one would work. If you've got a truck at home, if you're wanting to put a hitch on as well, I'd recommend getting the bigger one. And we'll torque our smaller ones as well. Now we're gonna reinstall our heat shield, and trimming is not 100% required. This will fit up in there if you don't trim it. But the location where this extra part is here that I'm gonna trim off is right between the hitch that we just put up and the exhaust, and there's a very high probability that we're gonna have rattles occur if we leave this in place. So we're just gonna go ahead and get rid of this. So that way we can ensure that we're gonna not have any annoying noises bothering our neighbors. And now roll our heat shield back up into position and re-install the fasteners. We can see the little part that we cut out though. This will allow our shield to kind of clear the hitch here, so that way we don't have any kind of angle downward potentially hit on our exhaust. You don't have to worry about cutting out the hole for that attachment point. You can't reinstall it anyway 'cause your hitch covers it up. So we're not like, changing the functionality or fit of this by doing so. We can then go back and tighten these down with our 10 millimeter socket. So now at this point, we can get our under shield back in place. We are gonna have to trim it if we want to put it back on there. You could choose to just leave it off, but we're gonna go ahead and trim it out so it'll fit. This is gonna be over on the driver's side. We'll need to trim it out to fit around the hitch there. And this is for that little attachment at the center. We'll also need to remove the lip here going across the front to make it thin enough to be able to slide back into place. So we'll just trim out these sections and then I'll trim that lip off. So now we're just gonna slide this back into position. It is gonna be a very tight fit. So just take your time and work it into place. So what I found was with these bolts torqued, it was extremely difficult to get this to slide in there, so I did loosen these back up a little bit. So you may want to hold off on torquing these down until you get your panel slid up. But you will need to torque those side ones down first because the panel is gonna cover at least the one on the driver's side up. And now we can more easily slide this into position with those links. And then we'll just reinstall our fasteners. The two that are towards the center here are gonna be covered by your hitch. The hitch, once you torque these back down will hold that tight up in there, so it's not gonna be necessary to torque those down. And now that we've got our panel back up, we'll re-torque those bolts. And now the only thing left to do is we're gonna take that spray lubricant once again on our hanger there, we'll push that towards the front of the vehicle a little bit. I mean, towards the rear of the vehicle and we'll just raise our exhaust back up, and it should just slide right back on there. And with our hardware all the way torqued down, we're ready to load up our favorite accessories and hit the road. And that completes our installation of Draw-Tite's 1 1/4 trailer hitch receiver on our 2015 Honda civic..