Martinjmpr
Full Access Member
OMG, Who the HELL designed this? 
Whoever it was should be tied up, whipped, shot, whipped again and shot again!
The GOOD news is that I discovered this on a warm Saturday afternoon in my driveway - not in the middle of the night in the pouring rain with my family in the truck! After screwing with the latch for almost 3 hours (yes, I read the manual, watched the YouTube videos, etc), reaching through the license plate hole with a pair of channel locks, sprayed with WD-40, etc etc, I finally gave up and out came the grinder. Ground one of the "ears" off of the wheel holder and it dropped free.
Given that the spare appears to still have the little "hairs" that tires have when new and still has a blue stripe on the tread, I'm guessing the spare has never been used and has probably never even been lowered. 12 years (it's a 2004) the first 8 of them in salty WI, and 137,000 miles meant that the factory spare tire holder was pretty much rusted into position.
I'm guessing that some of you must have discovered this horrible feature the "hard" way when you got a flat tire in the middle of nowhere. You have my sympathy.
So what are most of the rest of you doing with this thing? Repairing with a new part and just keeping it oiled? Grinding off the secondary latch so it won't hang up? Currently my spare is sitting in the back of my truck and it will stay there until I come up with a better solution. We're about to take some long trips pulling a trailer and I'm not going to go without a spare tire.
Whoever it was should be tied up, whipped, shot, whipped again and shot again!The GOOD news is that I discovered this on a warm Saturday afternoon in my driveway - not in the middle of the night in the pouring rain with my family in the truck! After screwing with the latch for almost 3 hours (yes, I read the manual, watched the YouTube videos, etc), reaching through the license plate hole with a pair of channel locks, sprayed with WD-40, etc etc, I finally gave up and out came the grinder. Ground one of the "ears" off of the wheel holder and it dropped free.
Given that the spare appears to still have the little "hairs" that tires have when new and still has a blue stripe on the tread, I'm guessing the spare has never been used and has probably never even been lowered. 12 years (it's a 2004) the first 8 of them in salty WI, and 137,000 miles meant that the factory spare tire holder was pretty much rusted into position.
I'm guessing that some of you must have discovered this horrible feature the "hard" way when you got a flat tire in the middle of nowhere. You have my sympathy.
So what are most of the rest of you doing with this thing? Repairing with a new part and just keeping it oiled? Grinding off the secondary latch so it won't hang up? Currently my spare is sitting in the back of my truck and it will stay there until I come up with a better solution. We're about to take some long trips pulling a trailer and I'm not going to go without a spare tire.
