- It's moving day, so
what better time than now to talk about hitching. - That's right, let's check it out. (upbeat music) (rock music) This is a video we've been wanting to put together for a while, even though we kind of covered hitching in our camp breakdown and set up video. We wanted to make a
separate dedicated video because it's a pretty important topic. - [Tara] We get asked a lot, actually, about it, so, why not do it? - We're gonna do a full
hitching up and unhitching. And it worked out great because Reese, who made our current hitch,
we had the Reese 27k as a Ford brand and accessory put in when we bought the truck,
well they reached out to us to see if we wanted
to try out their new M5 27K hitch. It would get rid of our
old scratched up one and get a new one, sure. - We weren't looking for a new hitch, we liked our hitch, but we
thought we would give this one a shot because it had some cool features that we were excited about. - Mmhmm, but we're gonna
show you some features that are new on this hitch
compared to our old one. From the head down it's
pretty much the same. It's a box with two legs on it and you can adjust up and down. You have 4 inches of total adjustment up and down on the hitch. Most of the changes are
gonna be in the head and then we'll show you those once we get to the hitching part. - Yeah, and we have a short drive today from one Florida Key to
the next Florida Key. - [Chad] (laughs) - So it's about a 45 minute drive, so we thought, perfect timing. - Yeah, good day to do this
where we're not gonna be filming our unhitching after
eight hours of driving. - [Both] (laugh) - Let's just pop the tailgate down here and show you real quick. The bottom-half, other
than cosmetic changes is pretty much the same. They were both steel
construction powder-coated. Our particular hitch is designed for the Ford puck system. The bottom-half will be different if you have a different puck system. But they will have the
right attachment legs for whatever type of truck you have. One thing I like about
this hitch is it's heavy. Now I know some people
don't like heavy hitches because they take them in
and out of the bed; we don't. Ours stays in here all the time. - Your back didn't like
it the other day though. - My back didn't like
taking the old hitch out, which we'll put a little
clip of that here. (laughs) But it can be taken out by one person if you take it apart. That's not part of what
we're gonna show you here, but it is possible. Let's talk about a
couple of other features real quick that we'll
show you once we hitch. - [Tara] So how does the
height adjustment work compared to what we had before? - They're actually exactly the same. Both are old-- - Am I blocking the view? - If you look here,
these are the leg pieces. I'm trying to... Line it up here. These are the leg pieces. And then this whole
center section is separate and bolts to those leg pieces. The center section does
have three levels of holes so that you can adjust it
2-inches either direction, from the middle to the top and bottom. And you'll want to adjust both
your hitch and your king pin. Generally you're gonna
adjust your hitch first because that's easier, but
both can usually be adjusted up and down a knotch or two
because you wanna make sure you've got 6-inches of clearance
between your bed rails... (taps on bed rails) and the bottom of your RV. Because as you're driving down the road the truck and RV don't
stay perfectly lined up, they're gonna be moving
and stuff like that. Particularly when you go
in and out of gas stations, RV parks, and things like that. Things move, so, if it's
too tight you're gonna hit and you're gonna damage
your RV and/or your truck. - Chad is going to be putting
together a whole blog post about the install of this. That is coming soon. - [Chad] Yeah, it's not rocket science. You bolt it in, you follow the directions, but I did video the whole
thing so I'm gonna put that together and put that out on our blog. So if you're not subscribed
to changinglanesrv.com you should do that, you
get more information there than you'll get
just in these videos. - Yes. - A couple of quick
notes about some changes they have made to the head
of this that I really like, and some things that are the same. One thing that's the same
is it's got a single jaw that wraps around versus
two that go like this, and there's no way for it to
kind of pop open this way. Just a preference kind of thing. The single-talon jaw in
this is ready to receive, meaning, I don't have to open it up. Before, I would have to
get out of the truck, come back, pop it open. This, I don't have to do that,
it just stays like it is. And the pin is going to
both push it out of the way, hit a lock-pin, and
close all in one motion so I shouldn't have to do anything. Another thing that this has
that our old one does not have is a red-green indicator
that will show you, hey, yes, you're properly latched. - I like that. - Again, it's not the
end-all-be-all, and a pull test is the only way to really know for sure, we're gonna get into that. If you know our friends, Tom and Cheri, from enjoythejourney.life. - [Tara] Yes, and they're
very experienced RV-ers, but they just forgot a step one time, and had a little bit of an accident. - [Chad] Yeah, and they had a new hitch and stuff, too, so. - [Tara] They do have a whole video, actually a series of videos,
about the RV smashes truck video, and that's what happens. - [Chad] It's the only
video I've ever seen of an actual pin-fail where
the RV drops on the truck. - [Tara] Well they just
happened to be filming because they just got their new
Momentum, so it was kind of like a new thing. Didn't really damage the rig at all, but it did damage the truck. - [Chad] Yeah, $2000 dollars
worth of damage to the truck. - [Tara] And we'll get into
this, but I know there are some differences of opinions
here and there about how to do the pull test
or to do the pull test, but we'll tell you why it's important. - The big thing with the pull test is your hitch can have all
the proper indications that it's hitched properly, just
like Tom and Cheri did that, the little pin popped
out, said it was fine. - A heavier duty hitch,
one I have not used before, but, nice little safety thing here, this little white
pointer means that we are in the locked position, so safe to pull. You can also see the arm
right there, over so. Like Cheri was saying,
we need a check-list. - The only way to know,
100% for sure, is to try pulling your RV, with the brakes set, and see if it comes unhitched. Now, there is some, not controversy, but there's a difference
of opinion, I think. If you look in the manual for this M5, it says to do a pull check; however, I make one modification to that. Some people will say a pull check is with the front gear down,
and I don't like that. - Yeah, then you're running
the risk of ruining your landing gear, or damaging it or something if something goes wrong. - Yeah, you know, you're
pulling on it and it's gonna put tension on those front landing gears, so what we do is we put
the landing gear like that far above the ground, that
way it's not gonna pull or damage it, but if it comes off the pin, it's gonna drop onto the landing gear. - [Tara] And I think that that
kind of covers any concerns about damaging your front jacks. - Yeah, it gives you the peace of mind of a pull check without the potential of damaging your front landing gear. So we'll get into that and we'll show you. - And I want to say that no
matter how experienced you are and how many times you've done this, always use a checklist. We always use a checklist, and
no matter what, if you think you've got this whole process down, you probably do, but you never know when your brain is gonna miss something. - Or a neighbor's gonna stop by and start chatting your ear off, and you
lose track of where you were. - Whatever, yeah, so go
through your checklist before you take off
because it's very important that you don't miss any steps. - Yeah, and we've done this
well over a hundred times, hundreds of times probably,
and even though I've got it in my head pretty well, I
don't go on to the next segment until I refer to my
checklist and then make sure that I at least check through them. So what do you say we get to it? - I say let's go, I'm ready to move. - 'cause we've gotta be out
of here in half an hour. - Oh. And we are leaving Sunshine
Key RV Resort and heading up about 45 minutes to an
hour to Fiesta Key RV Resort. - [Chad] Let's get to it. - I'm ready. - I'll help you down. - Oh, thanks. - As we talked about, I'm
referencing our checklist. - And those are available on our blog. - Mmhmm, we'll have a link below. If you watched our full camp
breakdown and set-up video, you know we've got checklists
for T-24, the night before or the day before, T-12,
the night before, and T-0, the morning of. - [Tara] That's right. - So now we're on to
the hitching checklist, the fourth and final checklist. Let's just go through them here. First of all, all the other
checklists are complete, that's the first check. We call it departure
checklist interior complete, T-24, T-12, T-0. - If you want to see this
stuff, watch that other video. - [Chad] Slides and awnings are in. Stair and handrails stowed. The forward bay is
closed and latched, yep. Pin lock removed, let's go get that. One thing you'll see down
here is this little disk, it's just like a nylon disk. It's called a lube plate,
so you don't have to get grease all over this, just one of these is all you need. This is a little pin lock we have, just for extra security. You know, if repo man comes
and wants to take our RV. (laughs) - [Tara] No! - Or somebody wants to steal our RV, these are really good if
you're storing your RV. I don't think we probably need this, but it's just a peace of
mind, you know, why not? All right, the next thing
is to go to tow height or hitch height. Our particular leveling
system has one button we push that will put the RV back
into the same configuration it was when we unhitched before we hit the auto-level button. Again, this is our RV. If your RV doesn't have this
then you wanna, basically, pull all your jacks up except your front, and get your front about
where you think it might be to hitch up, so, let's go do it. Hitch height. (motor buzzing) You can see it's pulling the rear ones up, and then it will probably
jack the front up. (motor buzzing) As you can see, all four, the
middle and rear jacks are up, and the front jacks came
up to about where it thinks it should be for hitching. We may have to make some adjustments and we're gonna stop
anyway, at that point, and talk about where
you want that to line up on your hitch. Some other checks that
we do are in the truck. (engine starts) Tow-haul mode. Mirrors extended. TPMS is already on and I'm
just gonna hang that up here. - [Tara] We got an anxious puppy. - [Chad] Daisy gets a little stressed out which is why we put her in the truck, so she knows, hey, I'm already
in the truck, I'm going, but yet she still thinks
that somehow she's going to drive the truck away without us. - [Tara] Yep. - [Chad] She's a dog,
she doesn't think a lot. - [Tara] Oh! - Swap out our E-Z Pass. If we're in the northeast
and we've got one E-Z Pass for the truck only and one
E-Z Pass for the truck and RV, we don't need that. Tailgate is already down. We're gonna back the truck up. We're gonna make sure that
the pin box is at the proper height to hit the hitch. Basically, what you want to
do is, the hitch articulates like this, you want your pin
box to kind of run up like this and ride it's way up on top. You don't want it to come down like this. You don't want it to be up here anywhere. You want it to just barely ride up and on, that way the pin slides
in, doesn't come down. 'cause you don't want what's
called a high-pin situation where everything is connected. It's in there, but it's sitting
on top of the jaw, bad news. - Ready to do it? - Yep, let's do this stuff. This is a lot of situations
where we've got, kind of squeezed between something
and back, so we'll see how this goes. (soft rock music) Don't want to hit the motorcycle. (soft rock music) I'm gonna have to go forward just a touch. No, we're pretty good right there. You can see that we're
a little bit high here. We want this to be down a little bit so it can ride up on, so I'm
gonna lower it just a touch. (motor whirring) Better to be just a
touch low than too high. That looks about right and we're
gonna just back it right on and see how this
ready-to-receive thing works. (metal clanking) (soft rock music) - [Tara] Did it feel any different? - Not really. - [Tara] It should be noted
that this is the first time we're using this new hitch. - And I just realized why it
was probably a little bit lower is I didn't have air in
the airbags there-off. The hitch height thing isn't
always gonna be perfect, in fact, it's usually
not gonna be perfect. And I was also a little bit crooked, so the hitching process was a little bit rougher than normal because
there was that sign there and I had to wiggle back. Sometimes it's difficult to
get it perfectly lined up. But the way this is designed,
you don't have to get it perfect, you just have to get it close and then get it on there. So now you see we have green here. And this is lined up. Oops, that's not what I wanted to do. That popped right out of
there, I'll have to fix that. - [Tara] What? - It's just the retainer thing
for this so we don't lose it. So, we'll worry about that later. I always remember there are
three things to hook up in here. One is this pin. Next is the break-away cable. I like this little bungee thing here, the little stretchy, slinky thing. It's a little bit better
than just a straight cable, it's not gonna get caught on things. Now you'll notice in the
directions they talk about connecting this down to
the base of the hitch, but I don't do that. I would prefer to connect
it to the truck because what happens if, for some reason the mount to the truck fails and
the entire hitch comes out with the RV, this is not
gonna get disconnected because it's going along
with the whole thing. If this is attached to your hitch, now the whole thing is off, and
no brakes are being applied. So I always hitch this thing
right here to the truck, that way it's connected to the truck and not the base of the hitch. Another quick note, when
you buy one of these, if you get one of these,
buy it with the pin that goes into the little box there. That's the part that pulls out. The reason being is it's a
good idea to have an extra one of those because if
you get some sort of crazy kids or vandals that decide
it would be fun to steal it and pull yours out, and then
you'd have no way to tow. So just have an extra one
just in case, which we do. Another thing that we check
is we make sure that we can see the jaw around the
pin and I can see the bottom of the pin down here. So that I know it's all the
way in, it's not high-pinned. And then the last thing, the last of the three things is the cable. (cable pings on metal) The 7-pin connector for lights and such. So you wanna make sure that
this isn't all wrapped up or tangled, it's just
hanging here and has plenty of room to slide around as you make turns. You also periodically want to get some electrical contact spray and make sure you clean out this and your
pins so that they're clean. So we're gonna leave
the bed down right now while we do our pull check. I'm gonna go back to our checklist here and make sure we're on track. Truck open hitch latch. We don't have to do that
anymore with this new hitch 'cause it's receive ready, which is cool. We've got that hitched
up, back on the king pin. We visually checked that the
king pin lock bar is locked. We connected the electrical
cord and the break-away cable. Now we are on to the pull test, so let's show you how we do that. Turn this back on. Down button, which pulls the jacks up. (motor whirring) Now we've got both of these
about an inch off the ground. You'll notice that one
goes all the way down, then the next one comes all the way down. So the trick is to let that
one come all the way down, let the next one come all the way down about an inch off the ground,
and then stop, and then push the down button, which
will make them go up, and bring the other one back up. You just gotta play with it. Once you mess with it you'll
kind of see how it works. But now you can see we've
got this one is about an inch and a half, and that one's about and inch off the ground, which is perfect. Our wheels are still chocked,
even though we're gonna use our brake for this pull test. So, let's just do it real
quick and see how it goes. (alarm chiming) All right, so quick pull check. Brake off. Got it in drive. Also on the checklist is
the make sure that the trailer brake gain is set. We like ours at about 8.5
is where we've tested it. So I'm just gonna hold
the brake right here. Again, your brake
controller may be different. I'm gonna hold the brake, which will lock the trailer brakes, which is
good even though we're hitched, and I'm gonna try to pull
forward just a little bit. Not gonna hit the gas,
I'm just basically letting off of the brake to put
some pressure on the hitch. I can see we're not going
anywhere, we're pulling it. Now I'm gonna go back to
neutral, let the pressure off, back to park. Put the brake back on and we're
ready to un-chock and roll after we do the rest of the checklist. Parking brake is set. Retract all landing gear. So we've got one button for that, which is retract all. Close the tailgate. This part is very important. If you try to make a turn
with the tailgate down, the tailgate will hit
the RV and damage it. Let's remove and store the wheel chocks. - Kay. (soft rock music) - [Chad] Tara is stowing the
chocks on the other side. Close all storage doors and lock them. We have RV locks on all
of our baggage doors. We'll verify the lights via radio. Now I'm basically just
gonna do a full walk-around. I'm gonna walk around the
entire front of the thing, I'm gonna look high, I'm gonna look low. I'm gonna make sure we
didn't leave anything in the campground or underneath the RV. Make sure all the slides are
in, all the things are latched, the ladder's up. The whole RV, just walk around real quick. - And once we pull out we still have to load Lucielle into the garage. - [Chad] Yup. - Next I go stand behind the RV and we test the lights. Because in the very
beginning of our RV life, we had the right turn signal go out, so we check them every time. - We do. Let's do it now. Now I make sure that the lights are on, make sure the camera is
working, TPMS is reading tires, I can see Tara here in the display. Radio check. (beep) - [Tara] Ready to go. (beep) - Commencing light checks. (beep) - [Tara] Brake (beep) (lights blink) Left. (beep) Right. (beep) (alarm chimes) Reverse. - Check-ity check. (beep) - [Tara] I'll watch the driver's side. - Yeah, watch driver's
side and I'll watch for trailer swing, and I'm just
gonna put right to my right here and we can load up Lucielle. (beep) - [Tara] It smells back
here in these mangroves. - (chuckles) Smells up here, too. (beep) (soft rock music) - [Tara] You've cleared
the electrical post. (soft rock music) - All right, time to go load Lucielle. (soft rock music) (engine revs) A couple of other quick things
to chat about in regards to hitches that you might have
questions on, so we'll try to head those off. We don't cover them, please
comment below, we'll be happy to try to answer. Let's talk a little
bit about the different kinds of hitches. One that's popular is a gooseneck. Now a gooseneck doesn't
have a hitch, per say, but the king pin itself is
designed to come up to that level and go onto a ball where
the hitch would be. A great option, I think,
Reese does make a gooseneck, and it is actually the only
one, I think it is either Lippert or Grand Design,
would certify on their RVs because it's really part of
the frame, the pin box is. The Reese one is certified;
however, it's rated at 20K and I prefer our hitching
system to be over rated verus rated right at our GBWR, which is 20K. - Right. - We hit 20,001 pounds and
we're technically over rating it or overloading it, so. Reese, if you ever make
a 27 or 25K gooseneck, we'd love to try it out. - [Both] (laughs) - It would be one less thing,
you know, you don't have that thing in the bed,
it would be really cool. Another option that people
seem to be really fond of is the Andersen hitch. Now that's a really
light-weight, like 30-pound hitch that's aluminum and it's kind of A-framed. And people either love it or hate it. I wouldn't say we hate it, but we've not-- - We don't really know anything about it. - We don't really know, we don't have any experience with it. We do have experience
with Andersen jack blocks. Same company, but they
make little red cans that you might see in some
of our earlier videos. We don't use-- - For the jack stands. - Yeah, it helps lessen
your jack extension. We don't use those anymore
because we broke nine of them. To Andersen's credit, they
kept replacing the broken ones, but after nine we're
like, this is just not engineered properly. It's supposed to be rated at
6K and we broke nine of them well below that 6K. - [Tara] 6K each. - [Chad] Yeah, 6K each block. We have a full-size 8-foot bed, and we can have a normal
hitch, we can turn 90-degrees without trailer hitting the
truck or anything like that, as you probably saw in our towing video. Now short beds have a little
bit of a situation where they can't do that, so it
requires either a special hitch or a special pin box. I know they make ones called
side-winders that might even be a Reese, I'm not sure. There are various options
that, basically what they do is when you're going to
be in a turning situation, it slides the hitch back a little bit, and then when you pull back
towing, it brings it back up between the axils. Again, that's just a rough, sort of... - Yeah, and we don't have any
experience with that either. - Yeah, no experience at
all, so really have nothing to say about those other
than if you have a short bed you will probably require
some sort of special hitch for a fifth wheel. Another thing that we get
asked quite a bit about, as long as we're on subject
of hitching and pin boxes, is our pin box. We have the Lippert Flex
Air, which has the airbag and the shock and the rubber pad. It's been a great pin box. The airbag and everything, you can see it working back there. It's always dampening motion
between the RV and the truck, so, it's doing some work. - Oh, let's see, how long do we have left? 33 minutes until we get
to our next destination. Long traveling. - (laughs) Yeah. - [Tara] Stay tuned. - [Chad] Stay tuned, we'll
see you at Fiesta Key, where we do the unhitching
part, which is much easier. (laughs) (soft rock music) We're here, we're in the spot, parking brake is set on the truck. And nothing else is done, so. Step one is we want to chock
the wheels, so, let's do that. (soft rock music) All chocked up? - Chocked up. - All right, so next what
we're gonna do is put the front landing gear down and get
pressure off the hitch, just off of the hitch a little bit. So we're gonna raise
it up til it just comes off the hitch a touch. (airbag buzzing) You hear the airbags kicking in. And tailgate down. (soft rock music) And we generally just hang it
over the back of the tailgate, so when we pull out it will just drop. - So you're awfully noisy. - Yeah. So what I have learned is
to get the hitch off easily is to put it in neutral
and just let it settle. So I go in, take the parking brake off, put it in neutral, let it
setting, put it back in park, and then it usually takes all
the pressure off of the hitch. Unhook our break-away cable. And this is gonna be just
a little bit different on this new hitch. First I gotta fix that,
so I'll put that up here. Pull out and back. That was actually pretty easy. Our old hitch, you had
to pull it straight out and that actually unhitched it, but this one you rotate the whole thing so you have a little bit
more leverage, I like that. So now we just pull the truck out. (metal clanks) (tailgate slams) (soft rock music) So now we basically just push auto level and set up camp. Put the pin lock back on. That's it. You can see our auto level's going on now. When it's done we put the
stairs down and we set up camp, and you can check that out in
our breakdown set-up video. - [Tara] That's right. - [Chad] This thing will
give us a green light once it's done, but
thank you for watching. Lifting with my legs, not my back! (metal clanking) (grunts) Trying to at least. You won't see us all cranky pants. - I'm already cranky pants, let's face it. - This is true. (laughs) Let's just put the truck-- This is a tailgate, I
know it's a tailgate. - Oh! (laughs) - (laughs) Want some help? - (grunts) Short legs. That's gonna leave a bruise on my butt. - I mean, you're pretty and all, but this new hitch is kind of pretty, too. - Can you imagine if we had the blue and black paint job,
then it would like be-- - Should we get a new
RV to match our hitch? Bottom-half of the hitch-- - (whispers quietly)
it's like, curling under. - You're tickling me! - Yeah, imagine how that feels on my face. Chad will be putting together
a whole blog post about thi-- about what? - The install. (laughs) - Okay. (engine revs) - Did you do a pull check? - Probably not.
