Roadmaster Direct-Connect Base Plate Kit Installation - 2019 Ram 1500

Products Featured in this Video

Roadmaster Direct-Connect Base Plate Kit - Removable Arms

1855 reviews

Code: RM-522203-5

Retail: $817.25

Price:  $485.00

• Base Plates
• Removable Drawbars
• Twist Lock Attachment

• Roadmaster

Designed for use with motor-home-mounted tow bars, the direct-connect brackets are virtually invisible, easy to mount and remove, and they eliminate the need for a quick-disconnect crossbar on your tow bar. Installs on your Ram 1500's frame.

Do you have a question about part RM-522203-5?more information >     

How to Install the Roadmaster Direct-Connect Base Plate Kit on a 2019 Ram 1500

Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today on our 2019 Ram 1500. We're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Roadmaster base plate kit with removable arms. There's going to be a total of five main components needed to flat tow your Ram down the road safely. The first one's going to be your base plate and that's going to provide us with a solid and reliable connection point. That way we can hook our tow bar up to it.

And that tow bar is going to be the second component. That's gonna be the physical link that connects the front of your Ram to the back of your motor home. The third main component is going to be safety cables and these are there in the event of an unlikely disconnect. These are going to keep your truck connected to the motor home. The fourth main component is going to be tow bar wiring and that's going to transfer the lighting signals from the back of your motor home to the back of your Ram.

That way other motorists all know your intentions as you're going on the road. And last but not least, the fifth main component is going to be a braking system. And what that braking system is going to do is apply the brakes in your Ram whenever you hit the brakes in your motor home, helping to bring you to a more safe and predictable stop. So this is what the base plate is going to look like on the front of your truck whenever you're not hooked up to your motor home. And honestly, I think it looks pretty good.

It utilizes these factory openings here and the bottom of your bumper. So you're not going to have to modify the front end of your truck a whole lot to be able to use a base plate. So, honestly, I think it's about as good as it can actually look. It does a great job of kind of blending in. And one thing I am happy with is the fact that the base plate kit gives you a spot to Mount up your wiring plug.

And that's not always the case with a lot of base plates and sometimes it can make it difficult especially on a truck like this to find a good spot to Mount up your wiring. So this makes it super convenient and easy to use. And we have the same setup here over on the other side of the truck. A lot of flat tow braking systems actually require you to use what's called a breakaway switch which is this component here and Roadmaster thought about that too. They actually give you a spot to Mount this up as well. So it makes it super convenient and a uniform at the other side. Whenever you are ready to use a base plate it's going to be super easy. And that's partly due to the fact that, this uses removable arms, which are these pieces here. And to get these installed into the base plate all you're gonna have to do is push them in rotate them about a quarter turn and it'll lock into place. And then that will allow us to hook up our tow bar. It's got to be set up the exact same way over here on the other side. And then once you're actually ready to hook up to the tow bar itself it's not going to take any time at all. And that's because this is a kind of a quick connect style. So you're just going to line up the tow bar. Push your pin through. Take your keeper pin here. Lock that in. Take your safety cables, so your openings are nice and easy to get to, everything's clean and organized. And that's really all there is to it. Now this base plate will work with most Roadmaster tow bars. However, if you have a different tow bar chances are pretty good. You can still pair the two together by using an adapter which you can find here at etrailer. This is what it's going to look like once you have everything all hooked up to the front of your Ram. And I'm a big fan of this base plate. Everything is right next to each other. So it makes it really easy to hook up and almost hard to forget or miss something. And that's not something you see with other base plates available for the Ram. So I feel like this one's just a little more well thought out and user-friendly. So at the end of the day I think if I was going to flat tow a Ram this is probably the base plate kit that I would use. Just the overall appearance, the ease of use and the quality of construction. It's one you really can't go wrong with. Now as far as the installation goes, it's really not too bad not a whole lot of things you have to remove or modify in order to get the base plate on. So it really shouldn't take you a whole lot of time or give you a whole lot of trouble. Speaking of which let's go ahead pull into the shop and put it on together now. To begin our installation, we're going to be working underneath the front of our Ram here on the driver's side. And what we need to do is remove our active air dam system. If your truck doesn't come equipped with this you can skip this step, but in our case, we do have it. So we're going to need to disconnect it and remove it. And we're going to be working right here in this area. So right here is the motor for the active air dam and we need to unplug it. So what we're going to do with this connector here is to take a trim tool or a flathead screwdriver. We're going to kind of pry back on that white clip and push down and that'll allow you to remove the connector. And then right here we're going to take this push pin fastener just pop that out, to separate the wiring. So on each side, we're going to have two 13 millimeter bolts like this, that we need to remove. So I went ahead and remove the other side already but we're gonna take a 13 millimeter socket. And get these pulled off. Once you have all of them off, we can remove our assembly here by kind of pulling it towards the front of the truck, dropping it down and then we can just set it off to the side. Now we need to do is remove our plastic tow hook covers here. If your trunk has actual metal tow hooks that come through here, this step will be a little different to get them removed. But in our case, you have these plastic ones and what we need to do to get them removed is come behind the bumper and pull off a couple of fasteners. So here's the back of our cover. And up top we're gonna have two eight millimeter nuts that we need to remove. It's a little tight on this side. So I suggest using a wrench like this. And get this other one off as well. And then we can come back, get a, flathead screwdriver. And I'm just going to kind of pry down on the top of this, and while I'm prying down, I'm going to try to push us forward a little bit and it should pop out. You kinda get it released like that, you can pull it out and we'll decide it to the side for now. And it's set up the same way over here on this side. And from this point on, anything you do to one side of the vehicle we're also going to do on the other side cause it'll all be set up the same way. And then on the bottom of our frame rail we're gonna have a body Mount bolt here that we need to remove. So I'll grab an 18 millimeter socket and pull that out. So if we look on each side of our vehicle we're going to see that there's a wiring harness that kind of runs down up along through there. And we need to remove the two clips holding it that way you can push it forward and give us some more room for our receiver brace. So you see the back of that one fastener, you're just going to take your trim tool or a flathead screwdriver and kind of pry it out. And you're gonna have one more down here. So you gotta kind of have to go off feel for this one, but it works the same. Just pop that out. And then we can kind of just push this forward to give us that room. So now we need to do, if you look here we're gonna have this bracket almost like a bumper support. And we're going to remove this bolt down here at the bottom using a 13 millimeter. And then we need to trim some of the side of the way to allow room for our base plate. So we're pretty much going cut to it even with this bottom part here. So I drew a line and this is pretty thick steel. So I'm gonna use a Dremel tool like this to get that trimmed out. So once this is cut flush out of the way, since we do have some bare metal exposed and I'm going to do is just take a paint stick and put a layer paint over that, just to help it from rusting. You can also use just a can of spray paint and it'll do the trick as well. I'll get this covered. And then we're gonna have a nut that we need to remove. So the nut that we need to take out, will be right here. And we're gonna remove that using an 18 millimeter socket. Now what we can do is grab our side specific base plate. You want to make sure you have the correct one. So for example, we're over here on the driver's side. And then a quick way to the tell driver's side, we have these wiring connector bracket there and the way this is going to work is we're going to slide this in. And, this opening here is gonna go over this stud that we just removed the nut from. So before we do that, I'm going to take some red lock tight, put it on the threads up here. This doesn't come included but you can get it here at etrailer. And all of the hardware that we're going to use to secure the base plate is going to receive that red lock tight. As I mentioned, we'll get this in place get that slid over. And then we're just going to take the nut and put that on a couple of threads, hand-tight. Now we can work on this attachment point right here. There's a hole in the base plate closest towards the front of her vehicle. And what we're going to do is take the M14 bolt and split lock washer. We're going to run that up through, and then on the top of our base plate here, we're gonna take the spacer. And set that on top of both around through it and then you can thread it into the frame. So, the reason behind this spacer is the base plate is going to sit against this portion here that's already on there from the factory. And so the spacer is essentially just kind of replicating that, if it makes sense. So take a hardware, make sure you slide the spacer on and this is just going to thread into a factory wall nut there. So we'll just get that started hand-tight. This point we can grab our long bolt. Don't forget your lock tight. Run that up through this attachment point, get a few threads going on that. And then right here, we're going to take the factory bolt that we removed. Get a couple of threads on that as well. Now for these two attachment points on our base plate they're going to receive the same hardware combination and we're going to take a half inch bolt. And one of the larger flat washers. Push it through. It's kind of hard to see but pretty easy to feel where it comes out right here. And on the back of that bolt, we're gonna put on on the smaller flat washers followed by a split lock washer and a hex nut. So it kind of just have to reach back there through that opening. You get your washers on and then get the nuts started. And again, both of these will just get hand tight for the time being. Now we can do with all of our hardware in place and hand tight is snug it all down and we're going to do the bolts against this face here first. So the ones facing towards the front of our vehicle, for these two, we'll grab a three quarter inch socket and wrench and get them tight. And then for the nut on this end, we'll just come back with our 18 millimeter and snug it down as well. So we got that one tight. We can do these two. So we're gonna use our 18. And for this one here, you use a 22 millimeter. And last but not least, we can come back to this bolt here and tighten it down with a 13 millimeter. And then we can come back and using that same tightening sequence, actually torque all of our hardware down to the amount specified in the instructions. So at this point, I went ahead and re-installed the air dam the opposite way that we removed it. And once you have it secured don't forget to plug your connector back into it. Now at this point, the base plate is complete. Now it'd be a great time to install other flat tow components. That way you can safely flat tow behind your motor home. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Roadmaster base plate kit with removable arms on our 2019 Ram 1500..