How To Determine If Your Pin Box Will Come Into Contact With Your Tailgate

Question:

I have a 2023 Ram 2500 short bed and going to order the BWRVK3670. I am purchasing a Keystone Cougar 23MLE 5th wheel trailer. The trailer has an Road Armor kingpin. Will I have to remove the tailgate when using this hitch? Thanks.

asked by: Tony O

Expert Reply:

Whether or not your pin box will come into contact with your tailgate is going to depend on a few different factors. Depending on how high you have the hitch head of the B&W Companion OEM 5th Wheel Trailer Hitch w/ Slider # BWRVK3670 in the bed of your truck will affect the amount of your pin box sitting below the bedrail line that could potentially contact the tailgate when the hitch travels back.

The only way to really know for sure is to actually test it out but we can get a decent idea by taking a few measurements of the truck and trailer. The jaws of the hitch will sit over the axle so you can measure back from the axle 12". From there to the tailgate would be the space for your pin box to sit in so the next step would be to find out how much of the pin box sits below the bedrail line.

To do that you'll need to measure from the ground up to bed for the bed height. Then you would need to level the trailer and measure from the ground to the king pin plate for the trailer height. You'll then subtract the bed height from the trailer height and get your hitch head height, which you can subtract from your bedrail height to see how much of the pin box will sit below the bedrail line. Once you know that you can measure that distance up from the king pin plate and anything that's below that line you can measure length wise to see if it would fit within the space between the 12" slide position to the tailgate.

expert reply by: Kevin C