Draw-Tite Hide-A-Goose Gooseneck Trailer Hitch Installation - 2015 Toyota Tundra

How to Install the Draw-Tite Hide-A-Goose Gooseneck Trailer Hitch on a 2015 Toyota Tundra

Today on our 2015 Toyota Tundra we're going to show you how to install the draw-tite hide-a-goose under bed goose neck trailer hitch, with installation kit. This offers a 30,000 pound rating. This is designed for use in the 5 foot, 7 inch, 6 and a half, and 8 foot bed. Part number is 9465-36. All right, here's what the goose necks going to look like installed in the stored position. As you can see we've got pretty nice flush fit here on the head, safety chain connection points here on each side, so we'll be able to get to those and make the connections that are necessary.

Here's our 2 and 5 sixteenths inch ball. This is designed to slide right down in after we remove our magnetic cover into the circular sleeve. Now, you will notice our ball and the gooseneck have a rounded hole, this round to round configuration, it's going to give us a more snug fit, that's going to reduce any movement also any noise that we might experience inside of the cab of the truck. Now, these goose necks are great for maximizing the towing capacity of our vehicles. This is going to give us a connection point here in the bed of the truck, and allows for easier maneuvering. When we're ready to set it up to tow, all we have to do is pull our orange handle located in our wheel well.

Then we can line up the slot that's in the side of the ball, with the tab that sticks off inside of the hole. Simply drop it right down in, and then release our handle, our pin will slide right in and through. Then once we have our pin slid back in, as you can see we got a real nice solid connection point there. Now, this is going to offer a 7,500 pound vertical load limit, so that's the maximum downward force we can put here, and it's going to offer a 30,000 pound gross trailer weight rating, that's going to be the total of out trailer and then anything that we got on it. Of course, we do want to look into the owners manual of our Tundra, we want to see what its tow ratings are, and we'll go off of whichever of those numbers are the lowest. Now, with this nice under bed mount design, with our ball removed, we're going to have full access to our truck bed, be able to use all of it.

Another nice thing is, with the custom fit rails we're not going to have to modify the frame of the truck at all. We're not going to have to drill, we're not going to have to cut, we're not going to have to do anything like that. They're designed to bolt in using factory locations, and then we simply make our holes in the bed for the safety chain connection points, and for our ball itself. Now, the first thing we want to do is, get our spare tire lowered down out of the way. Next thing we're going to do is lower exhaust. To do that we're going to pull the exhaust hanger here, just separate the rubber hanger from the bracket there.

A little lubricant will make it easier to slide off of there. We've got the one we're doing here in the rear and then the one located right up front, just behind the muffler in the middle. What we're going to do is just use a safety strap, come around the underside there. That's just going to give our exhaust a little bit of support, we'll start separating our hangers. Usually you can just pry from the backside and they'll pop off there. That should give us enough room to get up there and take the couple bolts out of our heat shield there, and set it aside. Also, while we're here, on the passenger side there's this passenger side there's this wire moon that runs down, it's connected into the top of the frame right there. We want to go ahead and pull that fastener out, so we're just going to squeeze the 2 tabs together, then we just pull upward on it. Got to get that down out of the way, then we can go over to our driver side. Here we're going to remove the 2 nuts located here and here using a 12mm socket. That holds one of the components of the fuel system on back here, so let's get those out of the way. Now we'll grab one of our rails, the rails are identical, so front and rear is not going to make a difference, we're going to be putting the rear in so this will become the rear. we want to take the large carriage bolts that are going to come with the goose neck head itself. We want to slide those through these oblong mounting slots. We'll then take the opposite side, we want that to face up and down toward the rear of the vehicle. Slide this in at an angle here. We'll get it right up over that frame rail, and we want to bring it all the way to the back. I guess what they call a hat channel here. you will notice right here there's going to be a small kind of a dog ear, it's got a weld nut on it. We need the full bet down and out of the way so it doesn't give us any interference. Now, I'll do the same thing and get our front bar installed, just the other direction. Now we can get our side plates into position, we want our small holes up, as well as our square hole. We want the frame connection cabs to be facing outward. Then we need to slide this right up between the 2 plates. Do the same thing for both sides. Now, in our kit we're going to have 2 different size carriage bolts, the shorter of the carriage bolts, that's for our upper mounting location for our side bracket. The longer, is for the bottom. What we'll do is take our square hole spacer, we'll slide that on and then position it so that it'll go through our frame and bracket. Just like that. We'll put on comical tooth washer. Now the teeth of that washer need to face up towards our bracket, or our side plate. Then we'll thread on one of our hex nuts. We'll do the same thing for the top location using our smaller carriage bolt. Now we're just going to leave these loose for now, we can tighten them up later. Now we'll head over to our passenger side and we can repeat that same process there. Now we can take our half inch by 2 inch hex head bolt, and slide a washer on it. That's going to come through our side plate, through our rail, and then that will add one of our comical tooth washers. Then one of our hex nuts. Do that loosely on our front rail and our rear rail. Now we'll just do that exact same thing over here on the passenger side. Now we're ready to put the hole in the bed. What we're going to do is look at our instructions, we'll get our measurement. Let's get it marked out here. Now, we want to remember since this has a straight in bed liner, we want to account for that thickness as well, whatever that thickness is we want to add on. We'll make our mark here. Then we're going to go side to side, and we want this to be centered exactly between both of our fender wells. Just want to be sure to measure a couple times. There's going to be a 3 and a half inch hole we're putting in the bed, so I know we'd like to have that in the right spot. All right, now we're going to use a 3 and a half inch hole, so I think is the best way to get our most clean cut. You can use your favorite method as well. This seems to do the job really well. Now once you've got your hole drilled out it's going to be a good idea to clean up all these shavings so you're not tracking them around and inside your truck. Now after using a little bit of preventative spray paint here, we just cleaned up our edges make sure we don't any bare steel out. Then we're ready to raise our head up into position. Now, as we do this we need the 4 oblong holes on the outside towards the middle to line up with our 4 carriage bolts. Then onto each one of those we're going to start a comical tooth washer. Again, those teeth need to face up towards our hitch. Also one of our hex nuts. All right, now that we've confirmed that our heads in position lets get our ball locking plate put on. See there's a little bit of pressure there so it's holding our head in position, if yours is loose be sure to hang onto it. Then just take the 4 nuts out, put our blocking plate right up on. Then get all of our hardware put back. Now let's go through and get everything tightened down, we want to do it in the sequence that's outlined in the instructions, that's also where you'll find your exact torque specification for each of our bolt. Now we can bring our handle in form the outside of our fender well, we'll pass it right over, then we can slide it right into our center section. Then once we have our holes lined up, it's just a matter of sliding it into our clip. All right, nice and secure. Now we're going to of ahead and drill up through the bottom of our hitch and our safety chain connection points, through the bed of our truck. We need to create a nine sixteenths hole. We use our nine sixteenths inch drill bit to mark our holes, drill a pilot hole, and then we can finish them off with the larger bit. Now that we've got those drilled out we'll take our U bolts, we're going to place those right down through the holes that we've created. Then we can head to the underside and get them fastened into place. Now, we'll take one of our springs, one of our flat washers, and one of our locking nuts and we're going to place it up on each of the U bolt threads where they come down and through. Now we'll tighten each of our nuts down, having a minimum of 3 threads showing below it. All right, now we just want to check and be sure we can pull up and down on them freely without them getting jammed up. That's good. All right now let's get our exhaust put back into position here. Remember we had the one here behind the muffler and then also one closer to the end of the tailpipe. We'll pull our strap off there. Now, we're also going to take those 2 nuts that we pulled off our fuel pump control here, get those threaded back on and we'll tighten them down. All right, nice and secure. Now the only thing you should have left will be your heat shield and the 2 bolts used to hold that in place. We won't be re-using that. Now when we're ready to release our ball we're going to pull our on our engagement handle and just tip it to the side. Once we've got our ball in place we'll just simply come out here and allow it to return to it's original position. Now with our spare tire back where it belongs, that's going to complete today's installation of the draw-tite hide-a-goose under bed goose neck trailer hitch with installation kit. Part number 9465-36, on our 2015 Toyota Tundra.