Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I bought this for my 2011 GMC Acadia. Good quality I can feel right out of the box. It fits perfectly to my Acadia. The only obvious thing you can see after installation is the 2" square hitch receiver head. Anything else is well hidden under the car (check out the picture I up-loaded). It is not difficult to install, although can be a little tricky when torque down the screws. I'm glad to have this on my car.
As for the installation part, the holes already exist on the beams in the car, therefore no need to drill holes to install. I spent only about 5 minutes to attach the whole thing to the car, but almost an hour to torque down the screws to the spec. Here are the steps for your information:
1. remove the bumper cover at where the hitch receiver is.
2. remove the exhaust pipe's rubber insulators
so you can lower down the pipe for easy access to the pre-drilled holes for installation. There are 2 rubber insulators for each pipe, one at each side of the pipe. They can be removed by hand by simply pushing (apply some grease on the rail helps greatly)
3. I had to use the 2 bolts for the back bean under the lift gate, for there is no pre-welded nuts on my Acadia. The access holes are just a little too small to fit the bolt head, so I had to grind about 1-mm off one side of the bolt head in order to let the bolt go thru the access hole. Use the fishwire provided in the package to set the bolts into the holes.
3. Pick up the hitch receiver frame, align with the pre-drilled holes on the car
You need to push around a little to get the frame to the pre-drilled holes aligned. Be careful, the whole thing is about 30 pounds. I sat on the ground, raised the whole thing and sat the frame on my legs to do the alignment. My son crawled underneath the car to guide me with the alignment. Once holes are aligned, he helped to finger-tight the screws for me.
4. Torque down the screws to the specified values
Once the screws are finger-tight in place use a torque wrench to tighten the screws to the torque specified. The screws are not that easily accessible by the big torque wrench. I used extension bars, swivel joints, etc. to get it done. It's not easy to apply heavy-duty torque at an angle. Maybe someone can teach me how to do that easily...?
5. Put the exhaust pipes back in place
re-install the rubber insulators to put the pipes back in place. Again, it will be a lot easier if some grease applied to the rails.
6. Done!
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Curt Manufacturing 13424 Class III Receiver
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