Soul-surfer, I too have a what I assume you mean a Dodge Ram pickup and have struggled with the placement of the spare tire. I run 35's on Expedition rims the spare of which will not fit between the frame rails in the stock location. 33's are about as large as will fit under there, so currently I have a 33" tire on a stock steel rim in that location. My twist is i carry a Lance Camper most of the time, another 2600 loaded pounds on the rear axle, so a Wilco any spare in the hitch hole is going to be in the way of the entry door every time. click on link for video:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9nmnfudkr1ngyj8/U-turn in sandstone cyn.m4v?dl=0
My buddie, Alex welded up his own swing away spare tire carrier, maybe a little heavier than the Wilco: the tire swings wide to the right.
Then you have to ask the question, "how often do I get a flat tire?" I've had very good luck over the years with tires not going flat, even though I abuse them regularly which shows the gains in toughness made by tire mfgrs. the last decade or so. It could be I just picked the right tire. As a former hard core rock crawler running tires at a variety of pressures down to 3 pounds in jeeps and down to 20 pounds in my RAM/Lance camper rig I've gone hundreds of miles at low pressure with no deleterious effect. Success in this realm had in some measure to do with preparation. We always carry a tire plug kit called, "Safety Seal" in any off road rig. It is by far the best one. The secret is the glue they use on the caterpillar-like cord used as plugs. Most likely, in my experience, 95% of flats, short of a catastrophic tread separation or blow out can be plugged with the Safety Seals. How many plugs did we use in this tire and it held air for 3 days enough time to get back to civilization and get a replacement? A rock cut was through the sidewall:
The other part of the flat tire equation is airing the tire back up if indeed it can be fixed. Most of the time these flats can be fixed with the tire remaining on the wheel. So, I use a variety of airing up appliances. I tried the China Freight, $50 high volume air compressors that attach directly to your battery and blew through a few of those on the first or second tire before they melted into the, "one piece-no moving parts" mode. Scratch those. For years I've used a CO2 tank, first a 5 pound tank and then graduating to a 25 pound aluminum tank with the correct freeze-proof hardware/hose. This allowed us to fill the large jeep tires at the end of the day for 6 days in a row in Moab with one tank of CO2. It's large and clumsy but gets the job done. This past week I bought a Viair 440p which is expensive but takes up less space and should do the job of airing up a flat with tire plugs and on the rim. It is the fastest gun in town of this genre; a 40 amp fuse so you had better keep your engine revved up while using. Years ago with one of these power grabbers we forgot to leave the engine on and the battery was dead after airing up 4 , 37 inch tires from 6 pounds to 30 pounds.
Looking down the road, I think my best option is to mount a 35" spare tire and fill it with only 10 pounds of air, relegating it to the stock spare location. Being mostly flat it 'should' fit between the frame rails and be unobtrusive until I need it at which time the Viair 440 comes into the picture to inflate the tire back up for use on the truck.
Until next time, jefe
