Our Old Hitch Didn’t Fail. We Replaced It Anyway.

Let’s be straight about something before a single bolt comes out: our old hitch didn’t fail. Eleven years of towing, hitching, and unhitching, and it never gave us a problem. It had scratches. It had wear. It would have kept going for years. Nobody needs to replace a hitch that’s still working — this was a want, not a need. New truck, and we wanted the hitch to match it. Pretty truck, pretty new hitch.

Disclosure, up front: B&W Trailer Hitches sponsored the video and sent us this hitch as part of a partnership. Read that alongside this fact: we’d already been paying B&W customers for eleven years, and when it came time to refresh, there was exactly one hitch on the list. Per our Product Review Policy, sponsorship buys a fair shake and nothing more.

So if your hitch is fine — keep towing it. But if you’re buying new, or you just picked up a truck with the factory puck system, this install is for you: the B&W Companion OEM, part number RVK3600, going into our 2023 RAM 3500.

The Company You’re Bolting Into Your Truck

B&W started in a garage in 1987 — two guys trying to make a living. Roger Baker was restoring classic cars as that work dried up; Joe Works had come through some rough farming years. They built truck beds to pay the bills. Back then, if you pulled a gooseneck, you had a ball welded permanently in the middle of your bed — always there, always in the way. Their fix became the Turnoverball: mounting hardware under the bed, ball flips over and disappears when you’re not towing. A hitch when you need it, a level bed when you don’t.

The Companion fifth-wheel hitch applied the same idea — one attachment platform, hitch out when you need the bed back. Roger retired in 1999; in 2007 Joe started transferring the company to its employees, and today B&W’s employee-owners build everything in Humboldt, Kansas. In the 250th year of this country, bolting an American-made, employee-owned hitch into the truck felt about right.

The Install — Honestly

First rule, and we mean this: follow B&W’s instructions, not ours. They have a full professional install video on their YouTube channel, printed instructions in the box, and a phone number with actual helpful humans on it. This is the component holding 15,000 pounds to your truck — you do it the manufacturer’s way, you call them with questions, and if anything’s in doubt, an authorized service center checks your work. What follows is our experience, not a how-to.

The fiddly part: the pivot arms come tensioned too tight to close. You pull a cotter pin, back the castle nut off about a turn until the arm seats snug, then bend the pin back through. Simple once you’ve done it — stiff the first time.

The hard part: the mounting blocks. The cavity they slide into is exactly big enough for the blocks and not at all big enough for hands, and the through-bolts have to line up with a vertical block behind the frame you can’t see. The instructions make it look easy. It isn’t. It’s also half the battle — once the blocks are lined up, everything else is a torque wrench: 110 ft-lbs on the mounting bolts.

The tip that saves you twenty minutes: the head leveling kit — a spring clip on the pivot arm nearest the driver’s-side cab — does not want to seat with a rubber mallet. We fought it. Use a metal hammer, tap it on, done. Then set the head, adjust until the saddle sits parallel to the truck bed, and lock the bolts underneath. We set our saddle height around 18–19 inches off the bed floor and verified after the head went on.

The maintenance habit: B&W includes a packet of lithium grease for the pivot arms. For our kind of towing — intermittent weekends, April through October — that’s a two-or-three-times-a-season job. If you tow more, grease more.

The Verdict

Everything we needed was in the box — all hardware, full instructions. Everything fit the way it should. The blocks were a bear, and honestly, they were a bear eleven years ago too. That’s the whole complaint list.

First hitch-up went exactly how a thousand hitch-ups before it went: back under the pin, the wraparound jaws grab, drop the pin, tug test — with Debi spotting to make sure Matt doesn’t mess it up. Her words. When a product survives eleven years of that routine and your only reason for replacing it is that the new truck deserved a shinier one, that’s the review. This is our forever hitch.

Not a RAM owner? B&W builds hitches and towing gear for GM and Ford setups too — their full line is at bwtrailerhitches.com, and they’re on our Partners page alongside everything else we actually run.

Watch the Full Install

The unboxing, the block-wrestling, the metal-hammer moment, and the first hitch-up on the new Companion — it’s all here.

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