hey everyone so you all may be familiar with another truck reviewer on YouTube that goes by the name mister truck Kent who is mister truck and I got together not too long ago and we decided maybe we should collaborate on some videos well he told me that he'd been working to do a couple reviews on some products that he just hadn't gotten around to doing and he said well maybe if I send them to you you can do an installation review videos on these products or items and give your feedback I told him I thought that that would be a great idea especially because some of the items he told me about were very focused around RVs and you all know that I love to do our v reviews as well as accessories related RVs so I hope you enjoyed this first video because we're probably going to work together on others down the road anyways if get an opportunity please subscribe to his channel it is mr. truck TV or visit his website which is wwe.com thanks everyone [Music] [Music] so hey folks so if you have watched my channel for any amount of time you know that I use the BMW companion hitch for the Ford puck system basically drops into the puck system twists those little handles and it locks into place and this has been a phenomenal hitch I really have enjoyed it the problem with this hitch though is it's extremely heavy I know that generally equates to being well built and I can tell you that the companion hitch is a very very well built hitch but it's a very very heavy hitch to move around that's the reason why I stayed in the back of my truck if I need more room I disconnect it I slide it up to the front but biggest problem I have with it is if I need to take it out of the truck it generally takes taking the thing apart and then moving it putting it back together and finding a place for it and anytime you have to move this thing around it's a chore I believe both components together weigh about 130 pounds so this is not a lightweight hitch and it's been great I love it it works very well I feel very secure towing anything I don't have a lot of chucking it's just a really solid hitch now that being said I really want to Hicks that I can move to that isn't going to break my back every time I try to move it something that's going to be far easier to get out of the truck or into the truck so I present to you my new hitch this is the Andersen ultimate 5th wheel connection hitch this is the gooseneck to kingpin mount hitch you've probably seen other videos on this I actually mentioned this in a video I did on towing with a gooseneck versus a kingpin type adapter on a truck this is the hitch that I mentioned to be the best alternative to going to a goose neck style adapter that's attaches to your kingpin which I don't think is the safest I picked simply because of where places the leverage this is nice because it's going to attach to my actual gooseneck hitch and it keeps the connection to the trailer up near the kingpin so I'm not going to have that leverage point that I talk to you all about in my previous video word essentially put stress across the frame of the fifth wheel by lowering the point of connection so in state of the andersen hitch clamping down to the puck system on the truck instead I'm going to use the goose ball in the center and it will clamp down to that now as you can see the goose ball on this particular hitch is rated 30,000 pounds whereas the andersen ultimate fifth wheel connection is rated at 24,000 pounds with the 4,500 pound tongue weight this is more than enough capacity for my fifth wheel and my pin weight by comparison my companion hitch had a 20,000 pound maximum trailer weight and a 5,000 pound maximum pin weight rating now the first thing I want to point out is when you get this box even though the hitch itself weighs about 32 pounds the entire box is going to weigh closer to fifty two pounds and that's because the coupler attachment which is going to go to your kingpin as well as a hitch ball itself which is already inside of the hitch are going to add that additional weight but it's still surprising how light this setup is compared to the BMW setup that I currently have and then the other thing that will be readily apparent to you is how much larger the bases on the Andersen hitch versus the BMW hedge the BMW hitch is a smaller base so it doesn't take up as much room in your bed when it's in there but it takes much much more effort to remove from your bed when it's time to pull it out whereas this hitch you can literally lift out with one hand now I've removed the coupler attachment from the box kind of take a look at it this thing's pretty cool so it has the cup right here that when it goes down over the ball it helps it slide in and this looks like that nylon material that is designed to be greaseless where it essentially acts as a slick surface of the ball drops right into the hole and here's the logic behind how this actually attaches to the kingpin on the truck so you take these bolts out and of course this is upside down right now you slide it over the kingpin put these screws back in and it attaches in the groove on the kingpin itself and then you have these four set screws there's two right here two right here that you tighten and it applies pressure against the bottom of the link pin plate and it keeps it from moving this is definitely one of those items that you really want to follow the correct torquing specifications to ensure that it doesn't move at all it's got this really nice release lever that lets use either a couple or D couple from your truck or trailer that's really nice now the newest version of this hitch has a ball with three adjustment holes in it for height and that's really nice if you want to adjust the height on the companion you have to unbolt the entire assembly and drop the head down or raise it up and that can be a pain this is a really nice setup in this ball weighs hardly anything it would take four of these hitches to equal the weight of the companion hitch that I currently use and again I love the companion hitch I think it's an outstanding product it's built extremely well had a lot of luck with it but the damn thing is just very very heavy and inconvenient to move around if you need to get it in or out of the truck this on the other hand you can essentially lift it with one hand and it feels exceptionally solid and I know this is the newest generation of the hitch now when I was telling you how much wider the base is how much larger the bases than the companion hitch I really wasn't kidding I'd say it's probably going to take up about twice the real estate in the back of your truck as the companion hitch so in a way to make the companion hitch a little bit easier to carry around you can take these pins out on each side and you can separate the two halves the top from the bottom but get this if I take these pins out and I pull the top off just the top of this alone weighs twice as much as the Andersen hitch it's just hard to describe how much easier it's going to be to remove this when I'm not using it so it can free up my bed space without having to worry about pulling a muscle on my back trying to pull out my companion hitch here's a couple close-up shots of the hitch itself very well made these welds are excellent welds again this whole thing is constructed out of aircraft-grade aluminum very impressed with the overall construction at this point so if you want to know how it ties into the actual hitch once you have it mounted on the goose ball you'll put the pin in at the bottom and then you'll simply tighten this bolt at the top and it will pull this assembly upwards to apply pressure while pulling the base down towards the bed and that's how it essentially attaches to the truck with a 30,000 pound weight capacity for my gooseneck ball and a 24,000 pound weight capacity on this hitch I don't think I'll ever have a problem again my pin weight on my fifth wheel is close to about 21 2,200 pounds max and this thing's rated at 4500 pounds so I think I'm going to be in good shape regardless some a little out of breath after moving the companion hitch from my truck like I said the thing's heavy and I broke it into parts both the top and the bottom half now before I put this thing on I need to mount the goose ball and I'm not going to do the full install today mainly because I'm not at my trailer so I can't do the tightening of this down completely until I get to it so first things first I'm going to remove the little cutout that I have here this went around my companion hitch I try to use velcro to hold it down but then I realized I really didn't need it when I have the top on you got to remove the little cap that covers up the goose neck hole to put the goose ball in you simply take the little top lever flip it up and turn it to the side like that drop it down turn it back and flat and it's now locked in and secured on the Andersen hitch I just have to remove this pin right here pop the pin out now I'm simply going to lower this onto the goose ball with the hitch ball facing the tailgate it tells you right here now once it's on the goose ball you want to line it up to the ridges on the bed as close as possible to make sure that it's as straight as possible so when using this with a bed rug the key is that you have to put the weight of the fifth wheel on the hitch itself before you tighten this down you tighten this down in the instructions it says 250 pounds but I'm going to tighten this down to sixty foot pounds because that's what the rep from Anderson said to do if you use a bed rug but the key again is to put the pin weight of your fifth wheel on the hitch so it compresses it and then tighten that down to sixty pounds so the first thing I'm doing now that I'm at at the RV is I'm cleaning off the kingpin in the plate I had one of those little never greased nylon plates that attach underneath and I'll show you that here in a second and it's basically in place of having to put any type of lubricant around this plate itself but as you can see this is pretty dirty and I don't want to install the adapter on this if it's all covered in dirt and grease and here's the plate that I removed this is actually the side that was touching the bottom plate and that's the side that's touching the hitch of the truck so first thing I need to do is attach the adapter underneath here I'm going to slide up right here and I'm going to insert the bolts through those holes okay the coupler attachment has been placed on the kingpin and a pro tip is the grease that is on your factory kingpin when you switch to this may prevent this from sliding on real well so you might want to take like a little pocket knife and scrape it off like I had to I've inserted the two bolts which are essentially holding the piece onto the kingpin itself so the instructions say to use a quarter inch allen head key to tighten down the set screws which are underneath here now they say you need to torque those down to 40 pounds but I really don't have a way of torquing that down accurately so what they told me when I called them is just to use the allen head key get them as tight as you can by hand and then try to do one additional quarter turn and that should be fine next the instructions say to go ahead and put the nuts on these bolts and to tighten them down till snug you really don't have to torque these down extremely tight mainly because their purpose isn't to add squeezing pressure they're simply designed to hold this adapter on to the kingpin by creating kind of a bracket that it fits on top of okay so that wasn't difficult at all so this is attached you can see the set screws right in between here pressing up against there these are tightened down to where they're very very snug but not what I would consider overly tight and next I have to mount this remote they suggest doing it somewhere here on the overhang I thought about doing it here I ordered some neo dime magnets to connect to them just so I can magnetically attach it like I've seen some people do however I think I'm going to attach it right up under here because it feels like there's a solid surface that I can drill into up here so I have now connected the remote latch here under the overhang and it went into some type of solid reinforcement that's back here but you pull that to uncouple press it into couple overall pretty clean look we have a bed rug in the back of your truck it's going to stick off the bottom of the bed by about three quarters of an inch and if that's the case you have to loosen these two set screws back here so this bottom portion right here drops down far enough to put that pin through to attach it to the actual gooseneck edge and as you unscrew this it will allow that portion of lower onto the fall itself now again because I have a bed rug I'm going to tighten this down snug but then when I load the weight of the pin on to the back I'll tighten that down to sixty foot pounds to go ahead and put as much pressure downwards as possible now I don't know if you can see but I have my tour correct sent right at sixty pounds so I've torqued this top bolt down to sixty foot pounds but I've left these two loose basically what they tell you to do is go ahead and load the pin weight of the fifth wheel on here make sure this tightens back down to sixty pounds again once it you know compresses it slightly and then tighten these back up once you have the full pin weight on and then retighten this back to sixty foot pounds again you [Music] working it down 260 foot-pounds and then these need to be torque down to 40 pounds I think you did a great job of the installation of the Andersen ultimate 5th wheel hitch it is a great job of show them how easy it is to install how light it is the way it works now I want to talk about why I think it's the safer product and why it can you know help you a lot of areas I've been using adaptors for fifth wheels to gooseneck balls for a lot of years and some are good some are bad being from the farm I'm a big gooseneck volcanic I and I understand 5th wheels you know it kind of originally started between the two sectors the farmers the ranchers like just a little ball in the bed and they can get rid of it turn it upside down take it out so they call hay or whatever they put in there and the RV folks kind of copied this in my world we're headed to mini 5th wheel it'll easier to connect and it you know it served its purpose if it but I always thought a fifth wheel connection the mini RV was a loose connection it's not quite like a semi set up so I mean I see these guys in California and expansion joints bounce around like a porpoise thing and you can just see the feel it moving forward and back and I see that a lot you don't need to see that with a gooseneck ball it's like your your socket in your shoulder it's a nice socket to the ball so it just swivels so it's easier to go off-road easy to get through dips I'm a fan of the gooseneck and what this Anderson ultimate hitch does is it hooks to a ball in the bed and then you've got a ball that connects to the fifth wheel from the adapter that goes over that kingpin and this is a greaseless top adapter so it's really nice very low maintenance on this and this adapter it's tall so it actually connects just like a kingpin does that kind of height very similar which i think is good because fifth wheels are not made as heavy-duty like a horse trailer or commercial flatbed or any of that so you know you can tweak those frames on a fifth wheel and like one manufacturer makes most of them so you want something strong and at the the kind of adapters you can used for years where a big clamp goes on a kingpin it drops down has all these extensions on and everybody makes one like that but they all have the same problem and it's not the extenders problem it's how well the frame is made on the fifth-wheel they don't take a leverage well like that so you start adding things to it extend it out you can peel off a fifth-wheel I've seen all that happen and then it can crack my brother had one where it cracked the frame but by the jacks in the jack wall flaw things can happen to you if you put too much leverage in a fifth wheel and that's what I really like about this Anderson it's up high the connection is good doesn't change the pressure on your fifth wheel in your toy which is what you want so this gets right into there you've got a nice easy connection stuff high enough you can see that's your rear-view mirror and your hook it up its greaseless sort of work for long or short beds and this you know it actually makes an eight to a nine inch offset if you're try to figure out how to get length in there and you get your pick a little further away from your truck window and also it can work for those big big pin bin pin boxes you get so close to your bed rail you can flip the hitch around like what big truck shows you here it's really good how its adaptable to have to pull up and up and down and you know and left there and forward and back so you have all that to fine-tune even on the really short short beds that some of these happens ever a five and a half foot bed so this will fit all those configurations it's easy to use it's quick it's like I really enjoy and I think that the big truck big RV did such an excellent job in showing you all those things on this so hope you try one out and see what you think see with the tighter connection you have less movement of the trailer it's quicker to hookup you know it's just that's how that works please watch the rest of the video I hope this video helps you understand why you might want to consider going as a gooseneck kind of adapter like this there's a lot of advantages to it and then please subscribe to our channels mr. truck comm big truck and then watch the end of this video now what I'm going to need to do is loosen the four set screws under here loosen this flip this around I'm probably going to have to unmount this mount it on the other side because again with this protruding out roughly four inches ahead of the kingpin and with the ball coming back roughly four or five inches it's making it pretty dangerous to try to make a really tight turn without making contact between my bed rail and this portion of the front of the kingpin now this actually turned out to be a lot easier than I thought I don't have to remove these I really don't even have to loosen them because these are just again acting as kind of a sleeve underneath the kingpin to keep it from falling off it's these little set screws that tighten at the top right here there's four of them at the bottom right there and all you have to do is loosen those and the whole thing spins around like that so I'm going to tighten those set screws back up I'll renounce this remote right here and I should be ready to go so I flipped the connector around or the adapter you can see how four set screws are tightened up against the bottom plate i retighten these down a little bit I had loosen them just a hair ran the remote right here and it is now mounted over here I'm going to put some RTV silicone on the other side so it just makes your no water moisture just in those holes that I had that's it guys I really like the hitch you know the fact is that it eliminated all that clunking noise you get between the kingpin and the jaws on a traditional hit you don't have any of that back and forth tugging motion anymore what I really like is how light it is and this adapter is extremely easy to install it's very solid and very well built I don't think I'm ever going to have to worry about a failure with this so I'm happy all around I hope you like this video I hope you like this partnership between big truck big RV and mr. truck if you do look for more of these possibly coming in the future anyways please like our channels please give us a thumbs up and please subscribe you
