Trailer Hitch Installation - 2014 Hyundai Sonata Draw-Tite

How to Install a Trailer Hitch on a 2014 Hyundai Sonata

Today on our 2014 Hyundai Sonata, we're going to take a look at and show you how to install the Draw-Tite Sportframe Custom Fit Class 1 Trailer Hitch Receiver. This offers the inch and a quarter opening. Its part number is 24853. All right, here's what the hitch is going to look like once you get it installed. As you can see, it doesn't hang down and quite as far as what I thought it would. It's kind of recessed a little bit, not as wide. The brackets really come out and really V-out to give you great support with it.

This is going to be a Class 1 hitch, so we're talking about light bb towing 00:00:30, light bike racks, light cargo carriers, things like that. This is a 200-pound tongue weight rated hitch and 2,000-pound gross trailer weight rated hitch. Of course, you got to look at the Sonata's owner's manual to see what it can handle and go off with whatever those numbers are the lowest. It offers the inch and a quarter opening here, so inch and a quarter ball mounts and things like that. As long as they're made for a Class 1, it shouldn't have any issue with. Muffler is a half-inch pinhole diameter.

Of course, you're going to have your safety chain connections here on both sides, and overall, just a nice, sturdy look for the rear of the vehicle. Now, a few measurements that might be important for you in helping to select your ball mount or maybe bike rack, will be from the ground to the inside top edge of the receiver tube opening, we've got about ten and three quarters of an inch. Then from the center of our hitch pin hole to the outer most edge of our bumper, it's about three and a half. All right, now the begin our installation, we need to get this muffler down and out of the way so we can get to this heat shield and also our access points. To do that, we've got a rubber isolator right here on this rear-most hanger. We're going to spray it down with a little bit of spray lubricant or a lot of bit, it doesn't matter too much. Before we pull that, we'll support it with a strap.

Well just find two good connection points on each side of the car up here with just this little Cambuckle strap. Just going to pull that tight. In that way, it'll have some support when we start removing this. We'll remove the one on the back for sure and maybe this one here in the middle if it doesn't come down far enough. All right.

Yeah, I think it'll be good to take down the second one too. It won't come down much farther, but it will come down some. Now for this one, we're just going to remove the bolt. You'll need a 12-millimeter socket for it and watch it when it unthreads completely. You don't want it to come down on you. It'll be a little slack here then it'll take out. Now, we'll release our Cambuckle strap a little bit. There, it comes down nicely to where we can get into our access points. Now, we're going to remove the heat shield. I've taken out the one, two, three, four bolts that we've got. Now, we'll pull this down out of the way. It's going to be trimmed in just a few minutes and then it'll go back in place before we put our hitch in. Now, we're also going to take down our smaller exhaust bracket. With all that out of the way now, we got our two foam pads here. You need to pull those out of the way. Here, you'll see our larger access hole. That's where we will put our hardware through and then back here, we're got one. Just a little bit smaller that we'll be bringing a bolt down through. Now that our driver side all cleared up, let's head to the passenger side and get it taken care of. Now for the passenger side, we don't have a dual exhaust set up so we've got this black panel, kind of an appearance panel that runs underneath. What we're going to do is remove the three Phillips-headed . They're a push style fastener, but they've got Phillips heads on them and then there's two knots back here we'll be taking off. One right here into the side of the trunk pan and one right up in the bottom of the frame rail. Now, these are just going to use a 10-millimeter knot or you'll need a 10-millimeter socket rather than taking it off. Then we'll use a Phillips head screwdriver just to unthread these far enough to where we can pull them out. It never fails. We're going to have one more bolt or knot somewhere and it's going to be right there. We'll back that up. Now, we should be able to pull it down and out of the way and we'll see our access location here. That's going to be the larger hole that our hardware goes through. There and this one, right there. Now for getting our hardware into place, we do have a slight variation. You can see we have two different sizes of 3/8-inch carriage bolt. We've got our one inch here then our inch and a quarter here. Now, the inch and a quarter is going to go to the rear-most hole closest to the vehicle's bumper. The 1 inch is going to go in our forward location. Now to get them in place, we need to take a fish wire, we're going to go right in our front hole location, and direct that towards the rear hole location. You see it right there Now once we have that out, we're going to grab this in. We'll slide our spacer block up on there just like that and then the longer of our two bolts will get threaded in like that and then we'll guide our block up and in, in our bolt. Then just slowly pull and draw them here towards the rear and it'll come out. Now, you want the square of the bolt to be seeded down into the square on the spacer. Now, we'll take our fish wire off. Our kit came with three today so if you wanted to like on the two rear ones, you could leave one connected. Kind of personal preference thing there. Now for our forward hole location, it's going to be tough to pull it through from this hole or anything like that. It's not going to work so we'll do a reverse pull. The block goes down on in our bolt just like before. Now this time, we place our bolt in first, slide it down the rail a little bit, slide the spacer block up in, and then give it a pull. There we have our forward mounting location. Now we'll go to the passenger side and do the exact same thing. All right. Now, let's get our exhaust shield trimmed and put back into place. Now, we're going to mark our heat shield for trimming. As you can see, we've got a larger hole here with an arrow 00:07:23 just behind it, just so you can orient. We've got the rounded part down. We've got the part that goes up towards the car facing up towards us. Right from this bolt hole, we need to come over a half an inch. It's going to be about right here, it's going to run right up to the edge, and we're going to take off this corner. Now, we'll bring this straight across for six inches. We got it right there and we need to go up two and a half inches, right there. From there, we'll come over 11 inches on that same plane and that same line, we'll mark 11 inches right here, and we'll go back two and a half from that, right here. That'll be our top cut line here and then we need to connect the dots or connect the two lines just like this. Now from there, we'll just follow this dotted line all the way down the edge. This will all be getting removed. This will remain and be bolted back in the vehicle using the three remaining bolt location. This is where some tin snips can come in handy. I always cut in inside my line or outside my line rather. Last thing I want is to get this thing back into place and then it not line up or I have to pull it back down. Just go around the outside of that line. It should give us plenty of space. All right. Now we'll raise the shield back into position. Just line up our studs that we're existing and start it on there to hold it up. Now, we can go ahead and snug down our fasteners, all right. Now if you've got a dual exhaust system, it's not a big deal. You'll just have to do that twice. Now, we'll raise our hitch up into position, guiding it up onto our hardware that we've pulled through. We want to be careful not to push it back in. It's a good idea to get an extra set of hands because it can be a little awkward trying to lift the hitch. I will just guide the hitch in over the exhaust there on the passenger side, raise it up into position so our hardware will come down through, then we'll put on a conical tooth washer. We want the teeth of the washer to be facing up towards the hitch and then we can thread on one of our 3/8 inaudible 00:10:31. All right, one started on each side here. That will help hold our hitch up into position, then we can get our other started. Now, let's take a quick look just to be sure we have our hitch seated on the vehicle, then we can snug those fasteners down. Now, we'll torque our fasteners down to the specifications that we'll find in our instruction. All right. Now, it's time to get the exhaust put back into place. Now, to get our exhaust back in place, we're going to take that bracket that we removed earlier and we're going to remove the rubber isolator from it. We can then return that to the customer as well as the bolt, and we're going to replace it with this provided bolt. What's going to happen is that we'll go right up to the hitch here. We want to slide our isolator right back into our muffler here, just like that. Our bolt is going to go through the hanger and then we just need to lift up on the exhaust and slide the bolt through the hole right there in that bracket. Then we'll take a flat washer, place it on there with a lock washer and our hex nut will thread right on the end. Now, all we have to do is tighten those down so it'll be nice and secure. All right, we've got that nice and secure. Let's not forget about the one we removed earlier in the middle. We'll get that put back in and then pull our strap. All right, we've got that thing wrapped up. We're ready to hook up to our bike rack or our trailer and we can head on down the road. The exhaust back in place, that's going to complete today's installation of the Draw-Tite Sportframe Trailer Hitch Receiver, part number 24853 on our 2014 Hyundai Sonata. .