I am trying to take the draw tight hitch off the 4runner to sand blast it and repaint it. everything went smooth (thanks to a 2 foot breaker bar) until I got to the bolts closest to the front of the truck. There seems to be some kind of spring loaded thing in there. I have never seen anything like this. I am assuming its factory since its inside the frame. I can stick my finger through the little rectangle opening in the frame and feel the nut spinning in there. I am not real sure what's going on and I am stumped.

 

when i took my hitch off to do the same thing, there were two metal pieces on the inside of the frame that had threaded holes for the bolts to go into. i assume it was once welded in there but mine were so rusty that they slid out the open back part of the frame, they were so corroded that they were trashed. perhaps that is part of what i just described but i can't remember exactly what they looked like.

 

see if u can get a hacksaw blade in down near the bottom of that bolt

 

You're going to need to grind or drill the head off the bolt to remove the hitch.
Then just use a seperate nut/bolt when you reattach everything (antiseize helps!).

 

A coil spring is used to guide the nut in the frame and hold it in place when the hatch was installed. If the nut is rusted out probably you are better off to cut the bolt as other members sugested.

 

The only problem with that is I don't know how I could get another nut down in there and hold it to tighten it.

 

I found these instructions. . It just looks like a crappy design on the part of draw-tight. I tried holding the weird little nut tail thing with some vice grips and its just twisting the the tail up. I am going to have to cut it off. I think I can come up with some sort of sqaure nut bolt combo that I can fit in there to replace this. I may have to dremel the access hole out a bit to make it big enough though.

 

I dremeled the heads of the bolts off and got the thing out. Its 30 and raining though so I will mess with getting new bolts and nuts in there another day. Winter really sucks.

 

I hate when I get motivated to do something that shouldn't take that long and it turns into this. This is when a tastes extra good. I'm gonna be repainting my hitch when it stops raining here in Indiana.

 

yeah, what are these things, as there is the same thing on my dad's F250...