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No bolt holes in right side of frame to attach hitch???

701 Views 7 Replies 6 Participants Last post by  Daavman
My towing hitch installation has a hitch: There are no bolt holes on the right side frame to attach to!
You read that right.
I bought a kit from eTrailer that I'm told will fit every RAV4 from 2006 till infinity. (Mine's a 2012.) However when I took the muffler hanger down to unbolt the bracket where the hitch bolts would go instead, I found the muffler hanger pin was welded on to the frame. Not bolted. And no nearby bolt holes in sight.
Don't believe me? Find Waldo in this photo?

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The customer service agent at eTrailer was dumbfounded. As was I. Nowhere in the literature can I find any reference to some RAV4s having welded on muffler pins instead of bolted. And thus no mention of frames that lack holes to affix an aftermarket trailer hitch to them.
Can anybody explain to me what's going on? Did I unknowingly buy a unicorn? Am I just not looking in the right place?
Just yesterday I saw a similar RAV4 to mine with a trailer hitch in the parking lot of my local supermarket. It took all my self control to not ditch my shopping cart full of groceries and crawl under it to inspect its hitch mount. (I still shoulda done it!)

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Wow! I've never seen this once while working at the dealer either. Are you the original owner? If not, maybe there was a "repair" down the road and they just welded a new piece up? Weird, I'm really not sure.
Wow! I've never seen this once while working at the dealer either. Are you the original owner? If not, maybe there was a "repair" down the road and they just welded a new piece up? Weird, I'm really not sure.
Definitely looks original to me. Perfectly smooth, uniform steel channel. No rough edges or grind marks.
I wonder if there's any clues to be found in the VIN.
PS: Thanks @2011BaseV6 for confirming I'm not crazy or stupid. Well, at least not in this specific case...
Wow- that's really strange. I have the same year Rav and that's where the bolt holes should be.
Are there possibly thin color matching plastic covers over the holes? Try some poking around?
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The bolt hole is there because I see the round outline. Just clean the area up with a rag to reveal the plastic cover. The layer of dirt is masking the cover hole.

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Well what happened. Holes there ??
Turns out there are holes there! They were just covered up, as two previous responses suspected.
A good example of one of those cognitive biases you read about. (Confirmation bias, maybe?) I was looking for something that looked like round plastic caps. So when I saw a smooth gray surface, my brain never considered the possibility that I could be looking at a thin plastic film - disguised by a decade of grime -covering the whole frame, with two threaded holes behind it, right where they needed to be.
Further throwing me off the trail was the red herring instructions to remove the bolts that hold the muffler pin in place when mine (and probably everybody elses) is actually welded on.
It was like finding the Lost Ark!
Once that mystery was solved, the actual install was a breeze. I also discovered that you don't even need to take the muffler hanger down if you don't want to (or can't get it off). It does make maneuvering a little easier. But it's not absolutely necessary.
Thanks again to the brain trust for helping me through this! This is why forums like this exist!
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