Demco Hijacker Autoslide 5th Wheel Hitch Installation - 2020 Ford F-350 Super Duty

Products Featured in this Video

Demco Autoslide 5th Wheel Hitch w/ Slider - Single Jaw - Ford Super Duty Prep Package - 21K

556 reviews

Code: DM8550038

Retail: $2,924.29

Price:  $2,119.00

• Fifth Wheel Hitch
• Sliding Fifth Wheel
• OEM - Ford
• 5250 lbs Vertical Load
• 21000 lbs GTW

• Double Pivot
• Premium - Single-Hook Jaw
• 15-1/2 - 18-1/4 Inch Tall
• 14 Inch Fore/Aft Travel
• Demco

This hitch slides automatically when you turn to give you 14" of clearance for tight turns. A wraparound jaw provides a smooth ride and a locking bar offers added security. Base secures in underbed mounts and removes for full bed access.

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How to Install the Demco Hijacker Autoslide 5th Wheel Hitch on a 2020 Ford F-350 Super Duty

Hi there Ford owners. Today on your 2020 Ford F350 Super Duty we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install Demco's Autoslide 5th Wheel Hitch. And this is what our auto slide looks like when it's installed. This will drop right down into your existing factory puck system on your truck. So you don't need to get any kind of rails or anything like that if you've got that. If your truck doesn't have a factory puck system though, we do have under bed kits or above bed kits available here at etrailer.com so you can get the appropriate adapters you need to get one installed on your truck.Unlike traditional fifth wheels that just kind of sit in position, this is an Autoslide unit, which is specifically designed for trucks that have short beds, so that's your six and a half than less.

And it's designed for those, because if we look at this mechanism here, when we go to make a tight turn, one of the issues you can run into on your short bed truck with just a regular fifth wheel head is if you turn too sharp, as the trailer begins to pivot on your fifth wheel here, the top of your trailer could potentially come into contact with the cab of your truck.And you definitely don't want that. That's going to wake you up real quick. It's going to be an awfully expensive repair. That's going to cause damage to both your vehicle and your trailer. With the autoslide it's designed to automatically detect that pivoting motion.

And that's why it's important that we have these adjusted appropriately for the mechanism to work right. And it will automatically allow it to slide back when you turn, giving you extra distance between the cab of your truck and your trailer. So you can make those tight turns without having to disconnect or having to have a larger truck. That really just opens up your options on what vehicles you can pull a trailer with. But when it comes to having a short bed truck, this is definitely the cream of the crop of having a nice autoslide, because many of the other types out there that are sliding aren't necessarily automatic.You have to stop, typically, this is when you're getting off the highway.

Usually you got to make a pretty sharp left or right turn to get onto the crossroad, whatever's there, and you have to get out and you have to pull a handle, so that way when you take off it slides back, you can make your turn and you can pull up, straighten your truck back out and lock it back into place. With this it does everything automatically for you, so you can just naturally drive your vehicle like you would if you had a truck that had a full size bed. It just does everything for you. And with this hitch you can pull up to a 21,000 pound gross weighted trailer. When you're ready to hook up to your trailer, you can easily do this from outside the truck.

I know I'm inside here, but you can reach right over the edge on the driver's side, pull the pin, and that will allow us to pull out the handle and then it'll stay at locked in the open position.And then when you go to back up onto the king pin of your trailer, you're backing up and it goes in, it'll hit the mechanism, and now you can see that our handle came back in. So we're going to grab our pin over here and we want to make sure we get it locked back into place. You may need to pull slightly out on the handle just to get the pin down in there. This is a pretty straightforward install. You just have to assemble the sides onto it and put your head on it. And then you're ready to drop it in and go ahead and use it. One thing I will say with this is it is extremely heavy, all the components are heavy, even just the side plates. They don't look like they're much. They're pretty heavy too. So you're definitely going to want an extra set of hands to help you maneuver this around.Now that you've added a fifth wheel onto your truck, you're more than likely planning on having a pretty large trailer hooked up to it. And all that weight weighing down here on the back of your truck can cause it to sag quite a bit in the back. So one of the ways you can help combat that and to restore your suspension close to the factory settings that you've got, restore a lot of that breaking and handling performance you're going to lose with your trailer hooked up is by getting suspension enhancements, especially here for the rear. A set of airbags is a great option for something you're planning on using only part of the year, because you can decrease the air in the air bags for when you're not hauling it, and then increase it up to the appropriate amount for the weight of your trailer to bring your suspension back up when you are hauling it.We'll begin our installation by assembling the slide for our fifth wheel. Should have come shipped to you on the pallet. I recommend just using your pallet. It's going to make it a little easier because you've got a nice platform to help lift it off your bed so you can lift it up. One of the ways you can do it is you could have it on the pallet and then pull it off, so it hangs off the side a little bit so you can access the holes here, or you could just lift it up and put it on some larger blocks to give you more room to work. We had some four by fours just laying around the shop here. So I just laid those out and sat it on top. And it's very, very heavy, so you're likely going to need an extra set of hands when getting it into the back of your truck.Once you get it in the back there, you can maneuver it around by yourself, but lifting it is pretty much out of the question. We can now to take the bolts that come in our kit. We're going to start with just two of them, and we're going to slide some washers on them. It's just going to make it a little easier to have these bolts prepared. Next we're going to need to choose the height that we want our slide to be at. And this is going to be done by getting your fifth wheel trailer level and measuring from the ground to where your pin box is to the king pin where it's going to slide in. And then you can do the same measure from the ground to the top of your truck bed. And then when we go to put these arms on you'll measure from the bottom of the arm to the head up here, so you can determine that height. Now ours we're going to be putting in the highest position because our customer doesn't have their fifth wheel yet.So this way we know he's going to have the clearance he needs for his fifth wheel to go over the bed rails. If he needs to lower it down to achieve a better level, once he's got his trailer, he can then do so. We're going to grab our side plates now. We're going to prepare those, just get that ready. You're also going to need a spacer and there's going to be two different thicknesses of spacers that come in your kit. You're going to have a quarter inch and a 3/8" thick spacer. We're going to be using the thinner ones to start. This is just to adjust the width of your fifth wheel. So that way it'll drop down into your puck system. Due to manufacturer variances between the hitch and your vehicle there can be some slight fluctuations and it might be difficult to get it to fit in there.So that's why these shims are provided so you can make that spacing so it comes in and out nice and easy. We're going to start with the small one and then go from there. You can use the small ones, the thick ones or any combination of them. So now that we've got that figured out we're going to go ahead and just start lining up our holes. You'll see there's a piece sticking out here, so it's not going to line up that way. So we're going to bring it back just a little bit. Since we're going to be going in the highest setting, we're going to be using the top set of holes on our side rail with the top set of holes on our slide unit. We're just going to go ahead and take our bolt. We're going to slide it through, then we can take our spacer plate. The holes are offset on your spacer plate. If you're using the top set of holes on your slide unit, you want to make sure that those holes are at the top. If you're using the bottom set, you just want to flip that over.Since we're using the top fit I'm going to go ahead and slide that on there. We're going to go ahead and get the bolt in over on the other side, down here, and then we can line those up and slide it right onto our unit. On the other side we're just going to follow that up with a flat washer and a nylon locking nut. Once you get one on each side started, you can then install the rest of your hardware. The number of bolts you use and their locations are going to vary depending on the height that you choose. So we're going to be going with the highest setting, which means we need to have four bolts across the top.Now we'll take the side plate for the locking mechanism that keeps your arms here in the locked in position. So we're going to open those up at first. This guy's just going to slide right down behind him. So here you can see the slotted holes on our plate lineup with the holes on the mounting plate behind it. So on the outer edges here, on the outer holes we're going to take the same hardware we've been using, slide it through. And then on the other side, we're just going to secure with the nylon locking nut. There's no washers for securing this piece. Now that we've got all of our hardware started we can go back and tighten down all of our bolts. We're going to be using a 19 millimeter socket and wrench.We can then go back and torque our hardware to the specifications found in our instructions. Now that we got all the hardware on this side torqued down, we can repeat the same procedure over on the other side to get that one installed. With our side plates on the piece of wood that I was using here, I just went ahead and moved down to the corner, because now we're rested on the side plate. So it's pretty sturdy, it's not going to fall over or anything. At the back of our auto slide unit here we need to put a brace in place. And we're going to put it on first, just to make sure that we've got clearance to be able to adjust it and get it in there. Now, if you're installing it in the lowest possible position, the studs that it comes with are going to go directly into the plate here.But if you're not installing it into the lowest position, and we're going to be installing ours in the highest, you'll want to take the nuts that come with the threaded rod here, slide it down through the hole and then place another nut on the other side. And this is going to be our jam nut system for securing this in the final position that we want it to be in. We're going to go ahead and strap down these real quick, and then we can go ahead and thread these into our plate. Now this is going to be a bit of a challenge here. They put a lot of powder coat on there, so you may actually find that to be quite difficult. So just kind of work at it, and you may want to wear a pair of gloves. And if you have a similar size bolt with thread pitch, you could run that through there first.So we got that threaded in there I just went ahead and just hand tighten the nuts down just to keep it from rattling around. Just so it'll be a little easier when we go to set it in place. At this point now we are ready to set it in place. So I'm going to go gather up an extra set of hands because this is pretty heavy. And we're going to remove the covers on our pucks in the back of our truck, and we're going to get her in there.Now with an extra pair of hands we're going to go ahead and lift it into position. The handles on the outside, if we pull those so they're straight out, that's the position we need it so they'll drop down in the pucks. And there might be a little bit of rocking you have to do to get it into place. If you just can't get it to fit, check your width and see if you're slightly too wide or not wide enough, and you can adjust your plates, either removing it, adding in a thicker one, changing out the sizes.But once you've got it all set, just to go ahead and try to twist your handles and see if you can get it to lock in. Now, if you're having a difficult time getting your handles to turn and lock in, then you may need to pull it back up and readjust the handles. The handles have washers that can be removed to give you a little bit better clearance to make it easier to get those locked in place. The nut located on the bottom here, once we've got it pulled up down at the bottom where it slides into our puck system, we can use a 19 millimeter wrench to remove that nut. We'll then slide the washer and space there off, and then we can slide our handle out and remove the washers.Now, in order to get the handle off, we do have to take off the plate here with the locking pins for our handle, it's going to be above our handles that won't let them slide up. So we're just removed those nuts and then we can slide this out of the way. Now our handles slide out and you can see there's a couple of washers on here. You can remove as many of the washers as you need, just depends on how tight it feels to you. Ours is so tight we can't even come close to getting it in, so we're going to be removing all the washers. Now this can vary between vehicle to vehicle and also between puck to puck, due to manufacturer variances. On ours we're going to be removing all the washers on the ones closest to the cab, because those we're extremely tight. But the ones towards the rear of the truck weren't nearly as tight, so we're going to remove only a single washer.Once you've removed the amount of washers necessary for this particular pucking handle set up, we're going to re-install the hardware. Make sure you put the spacer on followed by the washer and then the nut, and then just tighten it back down. It's a locking nut. So once you get it nice and snug, you don't really have to worry about it, it'll stay tight. So now we got it dropped back down again, we can push our handles in. There's still a little resistance to them, but it's definitely doable by hand now without the use of any other tools. And we can then slide our pins down here. And then we'll put the clip in on the bottom, and then we can move on to getting the head assembly on.So here we have our head assembly. We're going to start on the bottom side of it here. There's our single hole located in the bottom. That's for the urethane bushing that comes included with it. It just slides in there. There's nothing really that kind of holds it in there. Once we get the head assembly set into place it will rest in between the fifth wheel and the head here to provide dampening.Now we can take the large pin here. We're going to remove the clip from it on the end, slide this guy out. It can be pretty stiff, so you may need to give it a little tap. And if we look at the bottom of our fifth wheel head here, we can see the shaft that's going to go across, it's hollow. Our pin's going to slide through there to secure it. So we're going to go ahead and set this in place in between those two ears and secure it with our pin. And that little hammer with a little bit of tapping will help make it go in a little bit easier.Then over here on the other side we're just going to drop our pin down through the opening hole to secure it in place. We can now take our handle assembly, we're going to slide it on. I like having the handle pointed towards our cab, slide our bolt down through the top and secure it with the nylon locking that underneath. Then we can tighten this up with a 15 millimeter socket and wrench. We can then come here to the back where we can loosen these up until it sits flush down on our bed. So once you get it all the way down, we can then thread up our jam nuts here on the bottom.We'll then make sure we're perpendicular with our bed. Just going to give a little bit of hand tightness, just to kind of give it a slight preload on the foam gasket that's on the bottom of our plate here. We don't really want to use a tool to tighten these. We don't want to cause any damage to our bed or anything. This is just going to be a support for the back here. So we're just going to hand tighten those. Once we got those nice and snug by hand, we'll bring our jam nuts here on top down, and then using our 19 millimeter wrenches we're just going to snug these together. And this will lock it in place.And make sure it stays in that position down up against the bottom of our bed. Now at this point our fifth wheel is fully installed in the truck. The only thing left to do would be to adjust it to match the pin box on your trailer. So you'll want to measure the width of your pin box on your trailer, and then you'll want to adjust our capture plates here until they're an eighth of an inch wider than your pin box in order for the auto slide to function properly. This can be done by loosening the jam nuts here and then adjusting it in or out as necessary, and then re-tightening the jam nuts to hold it into that position. Since our customer doesn't have his fifth wheel yet, we're going to be leaving this in its stock position until he gets one, so we can adjust it appropriately for that trailer. And that completes our installation of Demco's Autoslide 5th Wheel Hitch on our 2020 Ford F350 Super Duty..