etrailer | Fifth Wheel Trailer Hitches Sidewinder Wedge Kit Review

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Hi everyone. Aiden near the trailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at this Sidewinder Wedge Kit for your B&W, Demco or Husky fifth wheel hitches. Essentially what this does is it mounts behind the kingpin on your pin box and whenever you mount up and hook up to your fifth wheel hitch, it'll slide in behind that kingpin and wedge itself into the fifth wheel hitch here. That'll keep all of the pivoting action out of here so that your Sidewinder can accurately move and have that pivot point back here giving you more clearance from your cab. Now comparing this to the wedge kit that comes with your Sidewinder, this is going to be a more custom fit option.
You can see it's a little bit more tapered on the ends here which helps it get a better fit inside your fifth wheel hitch. It's gonna just give that more contact, dispersing that force more evenly throughout the wedge kit helping to reduce wear and tear on both your fifth wheel hitch and the wedge kit. Now depending on whether you've got your B&W or your Demco or your Husky fifth wheel, there's going to be a certain way to mount it and you can see that we've got two welded points on one side and then on the other side here, a single weld point. Refer to your instructions to make sure you get that oriented the proper way. For our B&W, it's going to be with these two weld points facing in towards the kingpin and towards our truck cab.
When you're mounting this up you wanna make sure you have the proper orientation. This raised section is going to be face up into your pin box and the recessed portion underneath is where our bolts will go. It does come with its own hardware so you don't have to worry about that. The mounting holes themselves are gonna be spaced apart two and a half inches center on the center, and then the diameter of the holes themselves are gonna be three quarter inch. Now they make these in a variety of different fits for different fifth wheel hitches.
So if you've got a different fifth wheel hitch be sure to check out the right one for you. But overall, they install the same way onto the Sidewinder. We actually had one of our experts, Kevin, go out and install one of them so you can watch the install process and see what that would look like. Just know that depending on whichever one you pick up it's going to be a fit for your fifth wheel hitch. So here we have a trailer with a Reese Sidewinder.
Here's the generic like rectangle shaped Sidewinder wedge kit that's typically gonna come with your Sidewinder. If you look back here, you can see the rotary wheel and what this does is it allows our wedge kit to kind of move back and forth so that we can kind of fine tune exactly where it needs to sit. So if I pull this pin out and I turn it so turning it counterclockwise here, if I'm facing towards the trailer, it's gonna push it forward more towards the king pin, and then if I put it back clockwise, we can get it kind of back towards the trailer. Now one little tip I do recommend doing is once you find that sweet spot of where this needs to sit so that it properly aligns in the head of the hitch, go ahead and just mark it. So like our neighbor today, they've already marked it. You can kind of see it, it's a little bit scratched up just from connecting to the hitch but there's a yellow marker on here so that way you know exactly where it needs to sit every single time. You can easily put it back to where it needs to be and pop your clip back in. But let's go ahead, we'll take this off and show you how to put on a new one. So here is our old generic Sidewinder wedge kit. Do you see right here, it has one less tab on it, on this part. This is gonna be facing towards our hitch cuz it's gonna kind of overlap the head a little bit and then it'll stop right about here. So with our new one, we're gonna copy that as well. We'll have that facing towards our hitch. And I'm gonna go ahead and just reuse the same bolts. So we'll go ahead and get down under our pin box. And right here's that little plate I was talking about that we can bolt into. Go ahead and place our wedge up here. Just hand tighten that in for right now until we get this fully set and then we can use our wrench. Once we have 'em pretty tight, we can go ahead and torque 'em down. (torque wrench beeping) Also, gonna go ahead and back this one up a little bit. This is a little bit larger than our last one so we're gonna need to push it out of the way. We'll hook up to our kingpin and then we'll go

[@JosephDavis-mb3bo]

Sooooo both of those wedges will work? There’s two different wedges in this video.

[@etrailer]

The wedge you'll want to use will depend on which 5th wheel hitch you're using. If you'd care to reply and let me know, I'd be happy to recommend the correct wedge for your needs.
www.etrailer.com/Accessories-and-Parts/Reese/RP74FR.html