22 - Spare Tires (yes, plural) and Cargo Hitch Carrier

Since we'll be delving into sort of remote areas of Canada and the US, we decided to take 2 full sized spare tires. Winnefred came with one spare tire bracket on the bumper. The tire itself was of course dry rotted. We managed to locate another wheel at a junk yard. Then back to Amazon to buy 2 new tires. We got them both mounted and bought another spare tire bracket for the bumper. It looked fairly easy and straightforward to attach the bracket... but we were sadly wrong. As it turned out, we would have to remove the entire bumper which was held on by 4 very rusty 1/2" bolts. They wouldn't budge for us. Back to Boyd Coaker at Coastal Auto (Boyd also fixed our cab AC). He had the bumper off and the bracket installed within 15 mins! Air tools make all the difference.

A month or so ago, I came across a hitch cargo hauler thing on Craigslist. We called, we met, we bought, $60. It's pretty cool, it has 2' sides all around but also folds flat. We had to buy a 12" hitch extender, hello Harbor Freight. We finally got both the spares and the cargo hauler installed and ready to go last night. We'll use it to carry our propane bbq, chairs and spare fuel.


****EDIT: Turns out, the weight of the two spares was more than the bumper could handle. Check out post 23

2 Full Sized Spares & the Hitch Mounted Cargo Hauler