Part Numbers: DM47YV,DM8551008
This hitch manually slides to give you 14" of clearance for tight turns. Sturdy wraparound jaw has a locking bar for added security. Pivoting head allows easy hook up and helps limit chucking. Polyurethane bumpers ensure a smooth ride.
Features:
Specs:
Custom, underbed rail kit allows for uninhibited use of your truck bed once your hitch is removed. Works with Underbed Mount Series (UMS) fifth-wheel and gooseneck hitches.
Features:
Specs:
Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Today on our 2017 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 we'll be having a look at and installing the Demco Underbed Rail and Installation Kit from Demco Hijacker UMS 5th Wheel and Gooseneck Trailer Hitches, part number DM8551008. All right, here's what our Demco Underbed System looks like installed. As you can see, it doesn't take up any of our valuable bed space. It's completely recessed underneath the bed of our truck, and when we're ready to put in a 5th wheel or a 5th wheel slider it'll just drop in to our puck system. This almost converts our truck to almost like a factory 5th wheel or gooseneck prep package, where they have the pucks underneath the truck. Now, when we're not towing it does come with these plugs that you can snap down into place to keep any dirt and debris from entering down into the rails, making it difficult for your slider or 5th wheel to go into place. When you're ready to tow, they lift out real easily.
Now, these underbed rail system that we have installed is designed to work with Demco Hijacker 5th Wheel Hitches, such as sliders and non-sliders, and we can also use a Demco Gooseneck Adapter, which will drop right into place. This'll give us the versatility of being able to tow both a gooseneck and a 5th wheel trailer with these rails installed. Now, what I like about this rail system compared to other rail systems on the market is that it's an underbed rail system, meaning we'll have full capacity of our truck bed when we're not towing a trailer. When we don't have our gooseneck or our 5th wheel adapter in the bed we don't have any of the rails sticking up taking up our valuable bed space. Gives us a nice, clean look and looks like it's there from the factory. Now underneath our truck, having a look at our rail system.
You can see it in place here for our rear rail, and here for our front rail. These rails have a nice high gloss black powder coat finish, which will resist rust for many years down the road. Now that we've gone over some features, we'll show you how to get the Demco Underbed Rail System installed. All right, before we begin our installation we've already removed both of our rear wheels to make it a little bit easier to see for you at home. Additionally, we've removed our spare tire as well just for a little bit more working room. Now we have this exhaust heat shield above our muffler and exhaust system.
We need to trim a section of it out. I've already marked the rear section right here above this cross member, right by our spare tire mechanism. Our front section goes right in front of our passenger side rear shock mount, so we'll cut there and there, and remove these two bolts right here and this section will come on down. These screws are T25 torque screws. A lot of times these screws are cross threaded and held in place with Loctite as well from the factory, so sometimes you can get them out. We we're able to get one of them out.
The other times, sometimes you can't, so you have to cut the head of them off. With the head cut off, take out our section of heat shield. Okay, you can see where our line was where we originally marked. Now, this section's going to flap around and be loose, so I'm going to cut it additionally right by this bed support where we have two more screws. This'll keep us from having any noise underneath our vehicle when we're driving down the road. Now that we have our heat shield removed completely, we're going to take out a wheel liner so we have more room to work and easier access to slide our rails into place. There's about 13 of these T15 screws on each side that hold our wheel liners in place. With all of our screws removed, we can grab our wheel liner and we'll set it aside. We'll repeat the same process on the other side. Okay, we've followed the instructions according to our bed length and made the appropriate measurements to mark our four locations where we're going to drill our 2 inch holes in the bed of our truck. We have two here and here on the driver side wheel well area and two more here and here on our passenger side wheel well area. Now, in order to determine our measurements, according to the bed length of our truck if we have a 6 1/2 foot bed or an 8 foot bed, we measured out the appropriate distance from the instructions. From the end of our bed, not our tailgate, the end of our bed, made a line across, determined center, measured out the appropriate distance in the instructions to make our locations for our two holes in the back. Measured forward the appropriate distance, and double checked diagonally from our four marks to make sure they we're the appropriate distance and square to each other. Okay, now we'll take a center punch and we'll drill a pilot hole. We'll do the same for all four of our locations. You can see where our hole is, how it's right on the edge where our two sections come together as a V, so we want to have it centered where we made our mark. Okay, with all of our pilot holes drilled now, we'll now use an appropriate sized hole saw to enlarge all of our holes. If you have any burrs inside your holes after you cut them with the hole saw, just use a file to help clean them up. Now that we've de-burred our edges, as you can see we have an edge of exposed metal. What we're going to do is take some black spray paint here that matches our bed liner in our truck, spray around that hole so we don't have to worry about any rust in the future. We'll do that for all four of our holes. We have two options at this point in order to get our rails between our bed and the frame of our truck. What we can either do is unbolt the bed completely on one side and loosen the bolts a little bit on the other and raise the whole bed up, or in order to make it easier on yourself if you don't have a second set of hands, you can cut a small notch about 3 1/2 inches wide in line with where the holes are in the bed in two locations. That's what we're going to do in our case since it's a little bit easier and we don't have to worry about grabbing a second set of hands. Also, our fender liner will cover up where we make our notches, so we won't be able to see it ever again. Just use a rotary tool for this. Now, if you don't have a rotary tool you can also use your grinder. All right, as you can see we went ahead and cut out our other notch for our rear rail as well. Now, just like we did in the bed, we're going to use some spray paint to help prevent our bed from rusting. We're in the passenger side of our truck now. Now, right where we made this notch we have this wire, it's for our ABS sensor for our right rear. We'll pry this sensor up away from the frame. Now our driver side is very similar, but there's a few more things we need to do. We'll start at the ABS sensor again, this is for our left rear. We'll just tuck that down. Now additionally, right here in front of a bed channel, there's a clip that helps hold our brake lines in place. We'll pop this up too. Now that we have our clip loose here, we'll remove these two bolts right here. These two bolts are 13 millimeter. We're underneath our frame. This clip here is what we unclipped earlier for our brake lines. We'll just bend it down and hold it out of the way. We'll leave this where it's at, just unbolted for right now. All right, now that our frame has been prepped we can insert our rails into position. The rail that I'm holding here is our rear rail. We can tell the difference between this and the front one because in this area there's only one hole. Our front one has two. When we slide this into place we want to make sure that this hole here is facing up towards the bed of the truck. All right, we'll go to the other side and I'll raise it up all the way. All right, here's our front rail. As you can see it has those two holes I was talking about earlier. This is how you distinguish it from the back. Again, we'll want to make sure that this hole here faces up towards the bed of the truck. We'll go to the other side and lift it on up. Okay, once we have it touching over our frame we'll push it the rest of the way through the passenger side, and we'll try to line it up as best we can with the holes in the bed of the truck. Okay, we'll take our spacer here and insert it between our frame and our rail. Just rests on top of the frame like this. We'll make sure our hole here lines up with the hole in the rail. It's the same on all four corners of our rails. For our front rail we'll make sure our hole lines up with the outermost hole on the rail. We'll repeat the same process on the other side. All right, now we have our 5th wheel or our slider, whichever model we chose, in the bed of our truck. We'll place it down into our rails and secure it. Once we had it locked down, we centered our slider and got it square in the bed of our truck, and the weight of our slider will hold our rails in the proper position and now we can install our frame brackets, securing our rails to the truck. Now we'll take one of our 5/8 of an inch bolts, we're on our back rail right now. We'll put it in position, drop it down through the hole. We'll take our frame bracket, this notch will face towards the front of the truck. Slide it up, we'll place on a lock washer and a nut. All right, I used a clamp to make sure that our bracket is held tight against our frame while we tighten it in position. We'll use a 15/16ths wrench on the top and another 15/16ths ratcheting wrench on the nut in order to tighten this up. With that nice and tight we can remove our clamp and use the bracket as a guide to drill our holes in the frame. We'll drill a pilot hole to start. We'll continue drilling our pilot hole on the upper hole. Now that we have our pilot holes drilled, we'll enlarge them out to a 1/2 inch diameter. All right, here's a tech tip for you. You can either use smaller drill bits and work your way up to 1/2 inch, or you can use a step bit. I've found that the step bit actually goes through the frame pretty easily, and it will speed up your installation time. We want to make sure our bolts go through the hole nice and easily, which they do. Okay, here's our fish wire. We'll use this to bring our hardware inside the frame. We'll just insert it into the holes that we drilled, and it will come out this access hole right to the side of our bracket. We'll thread our neral 00:13:17 bolts onto the fish wire and pull it through the hole. Remove the pull wire. Now we'll take our 1/2 inch flange nut and thread it onto our bolt. Now we'll do the same for our other hole that we drilled. Okay, now that we have one bracket in place we'll repeat the same process on the other three brackets on the truck. All right, now that we have all of our hardware in place and started, we can now torque it to the amount specified in the instructions. All right, now that we have all of our hardware torqued in place and everything's installed, we can start the process of reassembling our truck and putting our wheel liners back in place. With our wheel liner back in place we can replace our wheel mount. That completes our look at and installation of the Demco Underbed Rail and Installation Kit from Demco Hijacker UMS 5th Wheel and Gooseneck Trailer Hitches, part number DM8551008 on our 2017 Chevrolet Silverado 1500.
Average Customer Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (71 Customer Reviews)
This hitch manually slides to give you 14" of clearance for tight turns. Sturdy wraparound jaw has a locking bar for added security. Pivoting head allows easy hook up and helps limit chucking. Polyurethane bumpers ensure a smooth ride. Custom, underbed rail kit allows for uninhibited use of your truck bed once your hitch is removed. Works with Underbed Mount Series (UMS) fifth-wheel and gooseneck hitches.
I like it’s design and how it sits in the bed. It seems to want to rotate some while pulling. I see some reviews that other people are having this problem also. Some have put a bolt down through the base into the truck bed. I haven’t wanted to do that as of yet. Otherwise I like the hitch.
The truck that got the install is a 2002 Ford F350 Super Duty 7.3 L Diesel dually. The Demco Recon 5th wheel hitch (DM8550043) looks like a well made, heavy duty hitch. All the welds are precise and well done. I like the single wrap around jaw with the real thick bar that backs that up. The handle that pulls out to unlock the jaw moves with ease and locks in the out position when the jaw opens. When the king pin comes in contact with the back of jaw, the jaw wraps around the king pin, the handle closes, you put in the safety pin and your ready to go RVing. I chose the Husky Custom Rails and installation kit (HT31405-686) for my install. The reason I chose these rails over the ones that etrailer had matched up for the hitch is, I had previously installed a set of Airlift Airbags and I didn't want the rail install to interfere with the airbags. It was a good choice, there was no interference at all. If I had not had the bags, I would have chose the rails and install kit that require no drilling. Drilling the holes went very fast and easy, it was torking the rear bolts down that was very difficult. There was not enough room to get a wrench of any kind around the nut. I wound up using a set of vise grips on the nut while a friend of mine torked the bolt slowly from above.
All and all I'm happy with the product and I'll give another review in a year.
Excellent product and customer service was outstanding. I just bought the product so I haven’t towed with it yet but after many many years of towing with other fifth wheel hitches, I can tell this is going to be an huge improvement!
The only issue I am having with the fifth wheel hitch is latch handle will not stay open (out) when hooking up or disconnecting from king Pin sometimes (and yes, I know how to work a fifth wheel hitch). If it wasn't for that I would give it 5 stars.
Easy to set up and use I borrowed a buddies cause I bought a camper and didn’t have a hitch set up in the bed of my truck just had the goose neck ball pulled real nice so I order o e just like it
Rugged product, easy to install, quick latch system. easy to remove. Purchased the Reese adapter with this hitch, and installation was easy. Some minor adjustments with the cam over lugs, and setting the hitch posts into the adapter. Overall very easy set up. Looks good, and can be taken apart in pieces, for ease of removal and installation, after set up. Ordering was simple and all parts came in about a week.
This hitch with the Airbourne Sidewinder worked great with the 2018 Ram 2500 Mega cab short bed with Ram boxes. Can maneuver a 90 degree turn without issue. Still have to get trailer lifted higher to get the trailer nose lowered, but for the complicated research we had on the right combo, this is tested and verified
I bought this to replace a Demco Autoslide hitch. The Autoslide was great but too heavy for me. Because of my bad back, this was a great choice! The hitch is awesome, easy to put in and out. Quiet and smooth towing. Thx E-Trailer!
Hitch works great and delivery from etrailer was fast.
Ordered hitch late Wednesday evening and received early afternoon on Friday, that is super fast delivery. Two cartons received with no damage and all parts were there as expected. It looks exactly as advertised online and it was at a great price. AND FREE SHIPPING.
Also made in the USA.
I am replacing my Demco Hi Jacker Auto Slider that weighs approximately 300 lbs with the Demco Recon that according to the shipping labels weighs 91 lbs. It will be installed on a Ford F150 with 5 1/2 ft bed and fiver with a Lippert Turning Point Pin box.
This is a really nice hitch for the money. Extremely easy to installl for one person. I can’t wait to pull my camper with it. The only problem I had was how badly damaged the package was when delivered. Fortunately the hitch was not damaged. The picture shows how it was when I got it.
Hitch came in two boxes UPS. The head was stapled and secured in one box. The base and upright piece came, not in a box, but rolled up in cardboard and taped up with clear packing tape. I put it together so I could hook up and set the height and there is no hitch pin and lynch pin. I don’t know if it was rolled up in the cardboard and lost in shipping or wasn’t packed at all. I also didn’t get the instruction manual and had to go to Demcos website for it. The base and upright being rolled up together banged up the base or it was used and returned and that is why it was rolled up and not in a box. Now I have a hitch that I can’t use because I didn’t get all the parts. Called etrailer for the hitch pin and lynch pin and don’t know when it’ll arrive because it’s not an etrailer part. I can’t review the hitch because as of yet I can’t use it.
So far so good pulling my fifth wheel around. I went this route so I could have dual purpose and not corner myself with just a drop in plate with my trucks factory fifth wheel package. No issues with this hitch, locks tight and no slop.
Part was delivered vey damaged. Looks like a couple thousand miles has already been put on it and it’s not even installed yet! Missing Lynch pin .313 is missing! Not happy at all.
very good product although when unhitching rv it wants to trip the latch. I had to address that problem by drilling a hole in the trip bar for the pin to hold it open.
works every time has never failed, replaced a curt 20k that i used for 10 years,lots of times it wouldnt click and lock .easy to use no chucking.very happy with this hitch.3 years ago i installed air lift air bags ,love them too!!etrailer is a great place to buy from
Seems to be a well built hitch and the 3 piece design is VERY nice in the load/unload space. Why this received 3 stars is that it was missing parts and the base was beat up badly (cosmetic) when received. Missing parts included the pins to connect the base to the rails and the pin to connect the neck to the base. Not usable at this point. Etrailer is sending out the parts, and I'll contact Demco for new stickers. Will update review and photos once I have used it.
The hitch arrived in four days was easy to install in truck not too heavy for a 70 year old man hooks up easy and I really like the double locking jaw the only issue I had was the wedge for my sidewinder the bolt holes did not line up took me about an hour making holes longer to be able to bolt up
Haven't used it yet but it's unlikely to be anything but 5 stars. I'll update review if so. The hitch came in 2 boxes. The head was packages in a HD box. The box that the base came in was battered pretty bad. But, no marks in the base. All hardware arrived. Took about 15 minutes to assemble and get set up.
This was an upgrade from the dealer installed hitch. Best purchase since I didn't know how much longer the old hitch would last. After purchase, I was at the dealership and saw they were now selling the same hitch. Solid and rattle free.
The product arrived as scheduled and all the parts and pieces were in the two boxes. It installed quickly in my pickup and I hooked it to the fifth wheel and moved it forward and back. Seems to work well, takes all the slop out of the hitch. The hitch seems to be well constructed and the double latch is what I was looking for.
This was my first (and only, so far) fifth wheel hitch. I am towing a Jayco 25.5REOK Eagle HT, with a 2019 F150. (Before you all "go there", we ordered the truck especially for this purpose, with the max payload package, max tow package, FX4, etc. I've weighed the truck and trailer combination on certified scales, and actual payload, axle, and tow weights are under the rated capacities for t he truck. The truck sits perfectly level with the trailer loaded). Anyway, with a 6 1/2' bed, I wanted to use a rotating pin box, and the lightest hitch I could find that would satisfy that requirement. Enter the Demco Recon.
What I like: It is very light, as all steel construction hitches go - right at 100 lbs. And it breaks down easy into three primary component - the lower base, the head, and the thing in between. So not component is more than 40 lbs or so. Takes 5 minutes to break down and stow away, leaving the truck bed with only the standard hitch rails.
A few things I don't like (but have simple solutions for): The assembly has too much play, resulting in a very clunky operation and feel. The base assembly has too much play between the upper and lower parts of the base. There is a set bolt provided to take this play out, but the set bolt is located so that you can't access it with a socket, and it's tough to get to with an open end or box wrench as well. With some effort you can get it tight, but it loosens up after a couple hundred miles. My solution was to insert sheets of nylon (plastic) between the shaft of the upper part, and the tube of the lower part, so that the fit is tight, eliminating the play without use of the set bolt. Also the play between the lower base and the hitch rails are pretty generous. (I don't know how other hitches are, but this one has about 3/16" of play). My solution was to add leather pads as gaskets, between the base and the rails, which makes the J-pins a little tight, but eliminates the gap and play. Eliminating the play in these two areas makes the hitch much quieter and feel much better. The last complaint isn't an issue with the hitch per se, rather, the combination of the Sidewinder Pin Box and the hitch head. I am using the recommended locking wedge (SWW-05), but he hitch head has a rather steep ramp, and the wedge really doesn't "wedge" much of the head. That is, there isn't an abundance of contact between the wedge and the head. It's enough when the wedge is tight, but the the head will work the wedge back and out of the slot over time, even when tightened to the recommended 150 foot pounds. If the wedge moves more than a fraction of an inch, the trailer will start to handle poorly. You can feel it. And if you let this go, it will quickly become dangerous. So, I've leaned to recheck the wedge and retighten if necessary after every couple of trips, and I carry my torque wrench with the trailer.
Thanks for reading.
Looks great
Looks great nice workmanship. Easy to install.
Packaging on large components should be changed??? Need custom molded styrofoam to slide on two sieds and hold product in shipping box. Will include pictures of delivered packages
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