Do I Need a Sliding Fifth Wheel Hitch?

hi everyone my name's Mike sherry and we begin a lot of questions about fifth wheel hitches you know the fifth wheel hitch that fits in the back of your pickup truck and particularly if you need a sliding hitch or not and the determining factor if you need a sliding hitch is if you have a short bed pickup truck so a pickup bed truck with a bed length from the rear of the bed cab to the tailgate below six and a half foot you're going to need a slider and I'm gonna demonstrate on my really high tech poster on the bulletin board here of why you need that and then we'll jump in and I'll show you a couple of different options on fifth wheel hitches themselves to show you you know what they do alright so this is high tech here so notice we've have our pickup truck up here it looks like a really nice pickup truck and then we have our trailer or fifth wheel this white emblem here and we have our pivot point right here which is right in the center of the bed right above the axles and that's where your kingpin of the fifth wheel connects to the fifth wheel hitch and this particular truck is the six and a half foot bad so what happens here is typically when you're driving down the road and you're turning you could not make all your normal turns in a six and a half foot bed the trouble is when you get to your campsite or maybe your home parking it in the barn and you need to do that 90 degree turn notice here how the fifth wheel starts to get into right there into the cab of the truck and right there you're really gonna mess it up so what you do is you have a sliding fifth wheel hitch now this is a manual sliding hitch you're only gonna use it when you're in those tight turn spots again when you're driving forward you're rarely if ever in this position and if you are you just need to be cognitive of it and go out and release your fifth wheel hitch to slide it back so to do that I'll show you here in a second but I'm gonna move this pin down and that's going to mimic a sliding fifth wheel hitch in the rear sliding position now you don't want to travel like this because the weight is no longer above the axle of the truck it's actually behind the axle but it's perfectly fine when you're in that tight spot or you're backing the the fifth-wheel up into a barn so no now let's notice now you're doing your turns and yeah everything's just the same there but if you want to do that Sharpe and I need to return to get it in a tight spot look here see how the fifth wheel does not hit the bed of that or the cab of the truck any longer so you can actually do above 90 degrees to really just be able to get that fifth wheel in that tight parking spot so now let's go out here I have a couple I actually have one standard fifth wheel hitch and one slider fifth wheel hitch in the showroom and I'll show you how they work so we'll start here with our standard fifth wheel hitch so this is provided by BMW this is an american-made product we highly recommend them here at the dealership and this is just gonna be your 5th wheel hitch that you fit in your long bed or your 8 foot bed notice it there's no movement here the fifth wheel itself can be removed there's four pins here these these two items here are what they call it rails those would stay in the bed of your pickup truck but if you didn't need the fifth wheel hitch itself in your truck you can remove these four pins and with a couple people that are pretty strong can lift this fifth wheel up out and maybe store it in your garage or barn when you're not using but when you are using it it's easy connect you just back your fifth wheel right up in here you have a couple latches that's going to hook around the king pin to secure it into place and you have a couple handles that will allow you to do that now this is the sliding hitch so this is what you're going to need if you need that six and a half foot bed and if you have shorter than six and a half foot bed I'll talk about that in a second but this does all the same things as the standard hitch we just looked at still has the connector there for the king pen still has the two rails actually the exact same two rails as what's on the other one so they are interchangeable if you'd ever maybe buy the wrong hitch don't worry you just simply need the new part up here you don't need the new rails now when you're in that tight spot we've got this in the current the travel position but when you're in that tight spot backing up like we just mentioned this particular one has a lever right here on the BMW and they're all a little different but that has the lever there that's going to allow notice this whole foot wheel mechanism now slid back and that's going to bring the whole fifth wheel itself back behind the axle and therefore allow you to do those sharper turns that I just mentioned in the video so I hope that explains the difference between the two hitches and why you would need a sliding hitch now there is another scenario where if you have shorter than a six and a half foot bed they actually have some five and a half foot beds out there so make sure you measure your bed this hitch here will not work in a five and a half foot bed you need what they call a super slider which what a super slider does it moves back automatically so as you turn your truck there's gonna be a mechanism then there that slides the fifth wheel back automatically because in a five and a half foot bed you will hit the nose of the fifth wheel to the cabbie or truck in forward motion just making your normal turns because your bed is so short so it's not the end of the world you can still tell a fifth wheel you just need a super slider hitch that automatically slides back and that's only in the five and a half foot beds six and a half foot beds you're fine with this option here to manually slide it back just be cognitive it when you do get in those tight hairy corners you need to get out of your truck and slide this back and lock it into place and then if you have your eight foot bed in your truck right here the standard fifth wheel option is just for you no need to ever come out and slide it it's just it's always gonna be right where it needs to be so I hope that was helpful for you if you have any questions about RVs give us a call at the dealership I'll post links below for our contact information and if you're in the market for an RV by all means take a look at our website we have hundreds of customers who travel all across America to do business right here at Paul Sherry's for a variety of reasons and I always tell my customers to discover why just go to google and type in Paul Chery RVs and over to the right side you're going to see our reviews and just read reviews from real customers of ours and why they did business with us so check those out so thanks for watching everyone I hope this clears up some muddy water on fifth woods

Channel: How RVs Work

Views: 58,778

Keywords: RVs, Travel Trailers, For Sale, Midwest, Paul Sherry RVs, Recreational Vehicle, Recreational Vehicle (Industry), Ohio (US State)

Id: tL3tsWRVbjk

Length: 6min 54sec (414 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020