Trailer Hitch Installation - 1998 Chevrolet Suburban

How to Install a Trailer Hitch on a 1998 Chevrolet Suburban

Today on this 1998 Chevrolet Suburban, we are going to install part number 75037 from Draw-Tite. This install also applies to part number 87546 from Hidden Hitch. Look at the passenger side here, we are going to show you exactly where the hitch is going to mount up. It is actually going to use these three existing holes that is going to be identical on both sides. All right, first thing we are going to do is enlarge the holes on the end of the frame. We are going to make those up to 1/ 2 inch. It is almost the same size as now but this is just to give a little extra room for the bolts. Now the next two holes here, we are going to enlarge to 9/ 16. Again it gives it better wiggle room to pull the bolt and the pull wire through. When you do this on the driver side be careful because the wire harness is laying inside the frame so be careful when you do that side.

First we will go ahead and install our hardware on the very end of the frame here. We can reach in behind the bumper and put it into place. When you put the block inside there, you want to orient it in this direction here because the cross member will get in the way where you can not put it like this or like this because the bolt will not sit straight. You want to use the block with the off set towards the side. The ones that go inside the frame are a little bit different. The next step is to go ahead and pull our hardware from the outside back to the inside of the frame. This particular kit does not come with a wire pull that is shown here. We will go ahead and install our hardware. We are going to start with the forward hole, and we will just go ahead and push your bolt leader through. You have to go through at an angle this way because part of the frame is sealed off.

If we twist it we can grab it from the top and pull it out. All right, then we will go ahead and grab our plate and we will stick that on first and let it fall in to place. Now it does have to sit a certain way inside the frame so kind of orient it a way it can fit on the way down because the plate has to fit inside the frame like this. So if it is sitting like this the bolt is not going to sit straight and it is not even going to be close. So try to set it up to slide down our wire so it falls exactly like that. And if it does not, you can probable take a screw driver and kind of poke it around and bounce it in there until it sits right. We got lucky there so we will go ahead and put our bolt on and then we will just thread this bolt back on. Now you can tell if you do not have it right if you can see the part of the plate blocking the hole so what you want to do is take is like I said, take a screw driver and just kind of poke it around until you get it to fall in to place where you want. Sometimes you can slip underneath and twirl it on the wire. And the center one you can actually push through the side to help yourself out. The same thing applies to the forward hole too. And you just have to use a screw driver and just kind of push it up and twirl it around and make it fall back in to place.

All right, once we have got the blocks in place we can go ahead and thread on our bolt and pull it on through. And we start working, pulling the bolts through on the driver side. Remember that the wire harness for the vehicle is inside there too. It is kind of up hanging from the top of the frame so we have got room on the bottom so it will not match it, however it is kind of a pain to get the block around all of the wires so on that side, chances are you are going to have to flip the block around to get it in the right spot. At this point we will go ahead and start hanging the hitch from the bolts which you do want to have an extra set of hands here because it is kind of hard to get it balanced and get six bolts lined up at the same time. So get some help and we will just go ahead and lift it up into position. And we will just use one nut just to hold it in place. So we will install a flat washer, a lock washer, and then the nut. Okay, now we go back to our original bolt and we will just install the hardware there. We have got our hardware install started so now we can go ahead and snug them all down and we will follow up by torquing the bolts down as specified in the instructions. With those few simple steps, our hitch is installed and there you have it for part number 75037 from Draw-Tite.