B and W Companion Slider Gooseneck-to-5th-Wheel Trailer Hitch Adapter Review
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Review of the B and W Companion Slider Gooseneck-to-5th-Wheel Trailer Hitch Adapter
Jake: Hey guys. It's Jake here with eTrailer. Today we're going to be taking a look at, and I'm going to show you some of the cool features on the B&W Companion Slider. Now this is going to be a gooseneck to 5th wheel conversion slider. It's going to slide down into your gooseneck hitch so that you don't have to worry about swapping your gooseneck out for a 5th wheel hitch. This is going to get the job done with both.Having this 5th wheel conversion in the bed of your truck is going to make it a lot easier on you.
You're not going to have to take out your gooseneck hitch and swap it for a 5th wheel hitch. You're going to be able to haul those gooseneck trailers during the week and use your camper that might be a 5th wheel, on the weekends.Now one great feature about this hitch is going to be the slide option. The slide option is going to allow you to maneuver a lot easier. With a short bed truck, the nose of your camper's already going to be closer to the cab of your vehicle. It's going to allow you to get that nose a little bit further back to give you more space.
When parking or when making any tight turns, you're not going to have to worry about the nose of your camper making contact with the cab of your vehicle.So as you can see here, we have our truck pulled at a slight angle. And you can see we're already about six inches away from hitting the nose of our camper on the cab of our truck. This is the perfect situation of when we need the slider. So let's go ahead and pull our slider lever and pull it out. All you have to do to engage the slide function is pull this lever.
Open it up, and now we'll pull forward.Now when engaging the slider, you want to lock your trailer brakes manually with your brake controller, shift into drive and then pull forward.Now as you can see here, with the help of our slider, we we're almost able to achieve a perfect 90 degree turn. We do have only about an inch and a half of space between the nose of our camper and the cab of our truck but this is a much better turning radius than we had before. This is going to help us out, especially in those tight parking spots when we need to wedge our camper into the spot.Now in order to get your hitch locked back into the towed position, we're going to need to pull our handle and then we'll reverse the steps that we did to unlock it. So we'll need to hold our trailer brakes, shift our truck into reverse, and then simply back up till our hitch locks into place.You're also going to get two inches of height adjustment. You're going to get anywhere between 17 and 19 inches.
So you just want to be sure that when setting your bolts on your head that you're at least six inches from the top of your bedrail to the bottom of your camper. You also want to make sure that you're pulling your camper level when headed down the road.As far as weight capacity goes, you're going to have a 20,000 pound gross towing weight and a 5,000 pound vertical load limit. You just want to be sure to check with your vehicle's owner's manual to make sure your vehicle can tow that.Now one thing I really like about B&W's hitches is that they're going to have a sturdy steel construction with a very thick gray powder coat finish and a very wide base. So it's going to give you that stability that you need to pull those larger campers down the road.Now the nice part about the B&W Companion, that gooseneck to 5th wheel adapter is going to be, it's just going to set into place. You're not going to have to bolt anything down. You open up your pin and then you of course want a second set of hands because it is significantly heavy enough to where you can't lift it yourself. B&W does make a hoist connection for this so that you could have a hoist technology in your garage to be able to lift it out of your bed if you're frequently by yourself. So we'll go ahead and set it into place.So here you'll see that we have four bolts. We'll have a bolt on each corner of our companion. And this is going to hold our wedges that are going to sit in the valleys of the bed of our truck. This is going to give it that nice stable base when traveling down the road. So we'll go ahead and tighten these down. You just loosen it up and you can slide them back and forth. You can see here we have it in the back of it Ram 2500 so it lines up perfectly with here. But if you have a Ford, it's going to be more to the outside. We'll go ahead and tighten them all down.Now in the center of your hitch, you'll see there's a bolt. You want to make sure that there's enough play in it to be able to get the sleeve that's going to slide down through your gooseneck hitch in your truck. It's going to have a sleeve in it to where that, when you close the pin, the sleeve will be underneath it and then you're going to torque this bolt down. One helpful tip I have for you is that you'll know whether or not that sleeve has grabbed your pin once you have your pin engaged, is that before you noticed we can pull our bolt up about four inches. Now we only have about an inch of play. So we know that it's grabbing our pin and we can go ahead and torque this down. Torquing this down is going to give us that nice solid connection to the pin on our gooseneck, so it's going to keep our entire 5th wheel hitch grounded to our truck.Now with your risers, you are going to have to install these yourself. You'll notice that we have a little bit more of a steep angle on the backside of our riser and the front is more straight up and down. It's really up to you, whichever you would like them to be configured. You can take this riser and put it over on the passenger side if you'd like to have the more straight up and down edge towards the back. Usually, they suggest if you have a long bed truck that you're putting this in, you put the more straight side towards the cab of the vehicle. But in our case here, our camper is not going to interfere with our cab, so we have it in this configuration.To get our hardware in place, there's going to be three different height options. Here we have it bolted in our highest option because of, again, our height of our camper. You're going to want to torque and tighten these to the specifications in the directions.Now, one thing I do want to point out before we get our head set in place is that our poly-bushings on top are going to be a no maintenance install. So, they're going to come on your uprights, but when you set your head in place, you're not going to have to worry about greasing them or oiling them over the years. They're going to take care of themselves, which is nice because that's going to take one more thing off your list when you get ready to head down the road.To get your head set in place, it's as easy as holding onto these two handles on the side and setting it down. And then you'll take your pins, pull out your cotter pin, slide your pin in and reinsert your pin.Now you notice when we set our head into place, these side handles are going to retract. They're going to clamp down on those rubber bushings that we we're talking about a little bit earlier. These pins are simply going to be a secondary safety device if something we're to happen to your handles.The last thing you're going to do is pull this pin, open up your handle, which is going to open up your jaws, and now you're ready to back up to your 5th wheel. Once your handle is latched, put your pin in and you're ready to go.Well guys, with all that being said, that's going to do it for our look at the B&W Gooseneck to 5th Wheel Companion Slider.
Info for this part was:
Installed by:
Jeff D
Installed by:
Randy B
Video by:
Joshua S
Video by:
Zach D
Video by:
Shane H
Video by:
Jacob H
Video by:
Thomas T
Video Edited:
Jacob T
Video Edited:
Dustin K
Video Edited:
Chris R
Test Fit:
Ryan G
Test Fit:
Bradley B
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Anthony G.
6/30/2021
I have a 2021 Forest River Sierra RV. I will be towing my RV with a Dodge Ram 3500 Dually. Is this the hitch I need? Thanks,