Roadmaster Direct-Connect Base Plate Kit - Removable Arms

Video Transcript for Roadmaster Direct-Connect Base Plate Kit Installation - 2021 Chevrolet Blazer

Hey guys, it's Jake here with Etrailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at and I'm gonna show you how to install the Roadmaster Direct-Connect base plate on our 2021 Chevrolet Blazer. Your base plate is going to be your main connection point for your tow bar to be able to connect to so you can flat tow your Blazer down the road. As you can see here, our base plate is going to be hidden behind the rear fascia, or behind the front fascia. You'll have your, these tabs here are removable so you won't see them whenever you're not flat towing your vehicle. The safety chain loops will stick out of the front fascia so that you can hook up to your safety chains.

What I like about this particular base plate is a lot of times the six pole is really hard to mount places. You either have to trim or try to make a custom bracket. This one comes with these little tabs that stick out, and all you do is bolt that six pole bracket right to it. It's also gonna have a tab for your breakaway switch, which is, again, that's another nice feature because you have to find something sturdy enough to mount it to so that whenever this plunger is pulled that it's not gonna rip the whole breakaway switch off. Now, the reason why those other features are really nice about this base plate is because you're gonna need places to mount accessories for your other components when you're flat towing.

And your other components are going to be, as we mentioned earlier, your tow bar, your safety cables, your wiring, which is your diode wiring that sends the lighting signals to your taillights, and then your braking system. So when you're not flat towing your vehicle, you simply unhook your safety cable. Pull this pin. Depending on what type of tow bar you have, you want to release that, pull this pin, twist it 90 degrees and then pull it out. And you can see here how a nice clean finished look that is.

We do have some base plate covers on our website that you can stick in these openings to make sure that the opening stays clean for the next time you have to put your tabs in. If you have a different style of tow bar, you want to be sure that you swap out the ends for your Roadmaster ends so that they fit into these removable tabs. As far as the installation goes, this is gonna be a a pretty involved installation. It's definitely one that you can do from home. You have to remove the front fascia off of the car.

That process is really not that difficult, it's just a lot of screws and fasteners that you have to remove, but nothing too difficult. Hopefully with my assistance you should be able to get it completed, but other than that, there's really not a whole lot that's involved with putting the base plate itself on. You will have to drill a few holes in your frame. But other than that, it's really not too bad of an install. So let's go ahead and check that out. To begin our installation, we're gonna have 12 push pin fasteners to remove this radiator cover. There's gonna be six on each side. We'll just take a flathead screwdriver, gonna pop out the center. And then you'll pop the base out. I want to take this panel and we'll set it off to the side. I'll have six T15 Torx bit screws that we'll have to remove in order to get this portion of our fascia to release. Let's take the appropriate drill bit, remove those. (drill whirring) Now underneath our vehicle, you're gonna have two T15 Torx bits that'll attach the bottom of our fascia to our air dam. Ours are Torx bits. You may have seven millimeter bolts here. Whichever they are, you just need to get 'em removed. Now on each side of our vehicle, we're gonna have three more T15 Torx bit screws. It's gonna be this one here on this little tab, this one, and this one here. (drill whirring) Now inside of our wheel wells, we're gonna have four more Torx bit screws on each side. We'll have one down here at the bottom, one about eight inches up, and then another one another eight inches up, and then there's one more right up here. This really helps to have a angled drill tool like this. If you don't, just take your time and you'll get it removed. (drill whirring) Now again, on each side of our vehicle, we're going to have to pull our wheel well liner back, and we're gonna be working back behind here. We need to unplug this light that's in this behind this marker. That is going to be right behind it. And then we're gonna have three seven millimeter head screws that are holding our light in here. So those screws are gonna be very, very difficult to see. We'll do our best to be able to show you that. Now you'll reach in there. You're gonna feel, our tab is on the bottom on the driver's side. Pull the little black tab and then disconnect that light. And then when it comes to those seven millimeter head screws, they're gonna be on a metal bracket. There's one right here, and then one straight up above it up here, and then there's one to the right of it. You can either use a hand ratchet or I've got a series of swivels and the socket and extensions to be able to get back in there. (tool whirring) Now in preparation to pull our fascia off, what we need to do is we need to tape off this seam because we need to pop this trim panel piece off. We're gonna tape on either side of this line so that when we go to remove it, everything comes off smoothly and we don't have to worry about scratching the paint. Now, in order to get this piece pulled out, we're just gonna slide a trim panel tool in between these two and we'll have to kind of pry up and pull out on the feet. So what you wanna do is once you get that out of there, and we're going to work up our fascia here and just slowly pop each one of these out at a time. This T15 Torx bit right here is what we're looking for. We'll take our little bit driver back in there and get that removed. Now with an extra set of hands, we're gonna come over to our fascia and start peeling it off. You just wanna start here at the vehicle on this side. You're gonna pry out. And what you can do is just slowly work your way up. If you need to use a trim panel tool or something like that or shim, feel free to do that. There's gonna be these little tabs that are holding, little plastic tabs. You just push this down on the inside of that and pop it loose. Here we go. Once you get all those popped loose, the fascia should loosen up on the front. Want to double check on your both sides, make sure that your wiring is unplugged. There's one more wiring harness down here that we have to get disconnected. Now, these are the two harnesses that are on the passenger side that are underneath the the headlight that we need to remove. Now working with our air dam, we'll need to remove this push pin fastener here that's holding some wiring in place. Pop that off, just kind of drape it around, and we'll have five seven millimeter head screws that are holding our air dam on. I need to remove those so we can set our air dam to the side. (drill whirring) Now we've got our harness over here by our windshield wiper fluid. We have to remove this, and just pull it up here to get it out of our way 'cause we need to measure for some holes we have to drill. Now what we need to do is we'll take our base plate brackets. You wanna make sure that you have the right one for the correct side. This is how they're gonna get mounted up. This is our passenger side bracket. This little notch here is for this hose to go. And basically what you wanna do is you wanna hold it up to this flange. Make sure that this part right here is about a quarter inch from the end of this flange. We'll put some marks where these holes hit the flange, and then we're gonna drill those out to 17/32. Now we're just using two zip ties to kind of hold this hose out of the way while we get this hole drilled out. But we just put a little dent there where we need to start our drill bit, and we'll just step up our drill bits until we get to that 17/32. (drill whirring) And once you get your holes drilled out completely, you wanna hit it with a little bit of clear coat to make sure that we don't start any rust or corrosion. Now we'll take our bracket. Want to kinda bend it around this area. Pull out, and line it up with our holes. And we're gonna take one of our shorter bolts that comes in our kit with a flat washer, slide it through our hole, and do the same thing for the back hole. You wanna take some red Loctite and put it on the ends of our threads here. Now, once we get our hardware hand tight, we're gonna come back with a 19 millimeter socket and a 19 millimeter wrench and we're gonna torque these down. Now we need to take our drill bits and drill a hole up through this bottom hole up into our frame rail here. We're just starting a little bit larger size. We've got our little dent poked in there so that our drill bit doesn't walk on us. And we're going to drill this out to 17/32 also. (drill whirring) Now, we could take that same size bolt we used for our other holes there, a split lock washer, and then we're going to slide our carriage, or our handle mat into the end of our frame rail. And this is kind of a fun little game. We're gonna slide our bolt up in there, and then you just have to line up your handle nut to the bolt. There we go. And you can usually tell once it starts threading, 'cause I can move this around and it's moving our bolt. So let's take that, run it in, make sure we're not cross threading. And then we will run that up the rest of the way and then torque it down. (tool beeping) Now, once you've repeated that same process on the driver's side of our vehicle, you want to take your handles from your handle nuts and just kind of work 'em back and forth until the little tack weld breaks off. (metal scraping) Now we've got our base plate lifted up into place. I've got one bolt on the top holding each side up. You want to take your spacer with the two holes in it, pry your base plate out. Then take one of our bolts with the collar on it, throw a flat washer on, line up the holes, and slide it into place. We're gonna take a split lock washer and a nut and put that on the back side. You wanna make sure that you have some red Loctite on there, and we're gonna put red Loctite on all of our hardware. Now we're gonna take our torque wrench and we'll come back and torque down those six bolts we just put in place. Now in order to get our additional support brackets in place, they're gonna mount up this like this. We wanna slide it up behind. It's gonna mount just like this. So what we need to do is we need to open up, there's a square hole right here, and we need to open that up, and then there's gonna be an opening up top that will allow our bolt to pass all the way through and go through our weld nut here. So slide this up, get it in place. Slide our bolt up through there. And that is gonna be another one of those 17/32 holes. Put a little red Loctite on it. You want to have a split lock washer on the head of the bolts and then a flat washer. (tool whirring) Now with our brackets lined up with our holes here, we can take another bolt with a flat washer, slide it up through the hole, slide a split lock washer on there, follow it up with a nut. (tool whirring) Now, for this we're gonna take a 19 millimeter socket on the top and a 19 millimeter socket on the bottom and we're gonna torque this down. (tool beeping) Now, when it comes to putting your air dam back up into place, we are going to have to do quite a bit of trimming on it. To start with, you're gonna have to cut this section out from the end all the way back. You want to cut that out so that our base plate can go through it. This piece will be separated from our bottom piece and same thing with the driver's side. You'll have to cut that little piece out, but it will allow you to put your wire harness back in there and then clip it back into place. Now as for the bottom, we're going to essentially on the two outermost, these ribs here, this one you're gonna leave alone, but the two outermost ones, you're basically just gonna cut out the center of that, leaving the rigidity to it for both of these. And that's to accommodate for that hardware to slip up in there. But once you get that trimmed out, you can mount it right back up into place. Now we're gonna take our multi-tool and we need to relocate our air temperature sensor, 'cause it's gonna be right in the way of where we need to put our base plate tabs through. So we'll take our multitool, just cut this tab off. (tool buzzing) Essentially what we're gonna do is I'm just gonna leave it in this little piece of plastic because it's pretty tight in there and it helps to protect a little bit. What you wanna do is you want to take a zip tie and just zip tie it off here out of the way. Now we're gonna trim out our front fascia for our base plate tabs. This is gonna be fairly simple, whereas there's a lot of other models vehicles, you're gonna have to cut like a clear hole through the plastic. For this one, we're just gonna take this cross member here and just cut it out. Same thing with the other side. (tool buzzing) And the reason I do it at an angle like that is because when we go to put it up in there, this is actually a hollow rib, and I don't like to see that hollow side. So we'll just trim out a little bit, test fit it, then come back and trim more if we need to. (tool buzzing) Now with everything put back together and everything's working properly, that's gonna do it for the installation.