etrailer | Curt Trailer Hitch Installation - 2011 Ford Crown Victoria

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Shane: Hey guys, Shane here with etrailer.com.Today I have a 2011 Ford Crown Victoria, and I'm going to walk through how to install the Curt Class II trailer hitch receiver. Adding a Class II hitch on your vehicle. It doesn't allow you to put a cargo carrier, bike rack, maybe you want to pull a small trailer. Adding a bike rack, we're not going to have to load the bikes inside the vehicle, try to fit them in the trunk. Cargo carrier, we can put some cargo on the carrier to make more room inside the vehicle for our passengers.It's going to give us an 1.25" by 1.25" receiver tube opening, reinforced collar gives us a little extra stability there. Hitch pin hole is going to be 1/2" in diameter.

It does not come with a hitch pin and clip, however, they can be found here at etrailer.com.You can see we're going to have rolled steel safety chain loops, very large openings to give us plenty of room for different size safety chain hooks. This is going to be a steel construction, black powder-coat finish. Really going to stay looking very nice for a long time.Now I'm going to give you a few measurements and weight capacities to help you when deciding on any of your hitch-mounted accessories, like bike racks and cargo carriers. From the center of your hitch pin hole to the outermost part of your bumper is going to be about 5". That number is important for any of your hitch-mount accessories that may fold up against your vehicle.

You want to make sure you're not going to make contact. From the ground to the top inner-most part of the receiver tube, it's going to be about 12". Keep that number in mind for any of your hitch-mount accessories that may require a little bit more ground clearance.As far as our weight capacities go, we're going to have a 300 pound max tongue weight, which is the downward pressure on the inside of the receiver tube. So when you're putting a bike racks on, cargo carrier, you want to make sure you're not exceeding that downward pressure. We're going to have a 3,500 pound gross trailer weight, which is a trailer, plus the load included.

That's how much the hitch can pull. I always recommend checking the owner's manual of the vehicle. Make sure the vehicle can withstand that amount of weight. You're going to go with the lowest number between the vehicle and the hitch.Now that we've gone over some of the features. So let's walk through how to get it installed.To start your installation, you needed to go from the edge of the frame rail, go back 1" and put a mark.

You're going to do this on both sides. Then what you're going to do is you're going to get an extra set of hands, couple of jack stands, and you need to get your hitch flat up against your frame rail. You want to make sure it's centered and line up the edge on that mark. Then you need to mark the center of your holes on both frame rails. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to come back and we're going to drill those out to our bolt sizes.I'm going to start with a pilot bit to get my hole started first, and then I'll remove my hitch and then come back and open my holes up the rest of the way. I want to make sure we open the holes up to a 1/2". For this forward-most hole, we're going to take our pull wire, we're going to go through and we're going to bring it forward to this large hole in our frame. We're going to put on a spacer block. And then we're going to thread on one of our bolts. We're going to pull down like that, remove the spacer or the pull wire and repeat that on the other side. And then for the rear-most hole, we're going to take a spacer block, set it in place and then take our bolt right in this large hole down at the end of our frame rail. This hole here, I did have to make my hole a little bit bigger because this bar actually runs inside of there, and it wasn't allowing my bolt to fall down through. Once you get all your hardware in place, we can start installing our hitch.You're going to have some spacer blocks that come in your kit. You want to use these in between the hitch and the frame rail to level out the hitch. For this particular install, I'm only going to need them on the back hole on each side. So what I did is I took a piece of tape and taped them on. You're going to get four of them. So if you need to use double in one spot or double on the back two go ahead and do that.Now, what we're going to do is we're going to lift our hitch into place. If you have an extra set of hands, I suggest doing it. If not, you can use jack stands to hold your hitch up while you install your hardware. And you're going to have a fl