The following is a short article regarding the installation of the original spare tire carrier as it was offered by Jeep during the AMC era. Not sure which years it was offered, but this is not very important at the moment.

Warning: Do not carry any big and/or heavy tire with this style tire carrier!
After mounting a 33" tire, the carrier broke off! Luckily this happened in the driveway and not at 65mph on the interstate!

On a recent salvage yard trip, I noticed an old Jeep Cherokee with one of those OEM external tire carriers and I went over there to check it out. It looked OK, but had some damage, probably caused by the previous owner backing into a wall or something. The hatch was apparently replaced and the carrier itself was bent a little bit. Not too bad though, and I thought that it will work just fine. I checked with the salvage yard people and they quoted my $85 for the carrier and the bumper. I thought it was definitely too much but went ahead and got it anyway. It will be a while until I can either afford an aftermarket carrier/bumper combo or be ready to weld something up myself. At this point, all I wanted is to get the tire out of the interior without having to resort to a roof mounted solution.

By chance, Brandon and I stumbled across this older XJ with a still usable external tire carrier. No rust, just a bit bent. The bumper too turned out to be rust free, but had some signs of normal wear and tear.

Before we headed out back to the yard the next day, we checked with Brandon's vehicle to make sure we got all the tools ready for the job. Brandon's XJ is factory equipped with such a spare tire carrier and it has worked for him quite well over the past.

The arrow points to one of the rivets holding a reinforcement bracket for the outer mount. Unfortunately, I didn't think of bringing a power drill with me. That would have made disassembly a lot easier.

Here the arrows point to the two rivets hidden under the right tail light. Again, a power drill would have been the tool of choice here...

This is the carrier and bumper unit. In the upper right is the bracket that reinforces the outer upper mount. The little piece in the upper left is the rubber stop that prevents the carrier from rattling.

Now the fun begins. Reassembly on this '89 XJ. (Note: the following pictures may show an installation that may appear a bit crude. This XJ is so beat up from many wheeling trips, that even a couple extra dents and scratches from this install won't make the slightest difference in appearance. This installation is a bit tricky and not wholeheartedly recommended for nice and shiny boulevard XJs.)

The trickiest part was to get the holes for the outer mount aligned.The hole locations are predetermined by the inner reinforcement bracket. We tried to use a center punch but since it is very tight to reach in there, a perfect alignment was not always possible.

The remaining two holes are drilled out in this picture. Note that the inner bracket is installed. You can see this by the two rivets which will be later hidden behind the passenger side tail light.

It turned out harder than anticipated to properly align the holes so they would perfectly match the inner reinforcement bracket. A hammer helped to convince the outer bracke to "fit". The dents are proof of that approach. The passenger side "4x4" label had to be removed and traces can be seen on the right side of the picture between the upper and lower right holes. Before the outer mount was finally installed, we applied liberal amounts of blue RTV to seal things up. There is a rubber piece that usually goes behind it but we left it out (i.e., we lost it somewhere on the yard...)

Getting the the nuts threaded from the inside was a task where a couple of additional joints in the human arm would have come in handy (once again). Patience, however, compensated for that shortcoming of the human anatomy.

This bracket is holding the rubber bump stop on the tail gate. This is on the inside of the tail gate, obviously.

On top is the original wheel bolt of the tire carrier. On the bottom is a typical wheel stud from an auto store. The carrier was missing one of the OEM wheel bolts and therefore I replaced all of them with longer studs to accomodate in part for the bigger tire (currently 31"x10.5"). At some point a spot weld on the back side on each bolt would be needed to make sure the new wheel studs won't turn when the spare tire has to come down. I also needed some spacers behind the wheel lugs because the threaded part of those generic studs was too short and I ran out of "thread" before the tire sat really tight. Plus, a deflated tire would be really loose otherwise.

My idea of fixing this shortcoming will be a little "slider" that will go into the rear hitch with a little plate welded to it in an angle. Upon coming down a ledge, the slider plate in the hitch receiver will hopefully take the beating and push the vehicle far enough forward to keep the tire and in particular the fragile latch out of harm's way.

This tire carrier opens and closes easily and does not obstruct the view through the rear window to any great extend inspite of the oversized tire due to its relative low mounting.

The installation left a couple of dents and scratches behind, due to the fact that Brandon and I ran out of time and had to get this project done. With some care, even a newer vehicle could be retrofitted with one of those carriers. Of course, there is a large number of more suitable aftermarket bumpers and carriers available, but all of these were out of reach for me in a financial sense. If this will last another three years (expected/projected remaining life time of this XJ), I will be more than happy.

I want to thank Brandon Shehan for his great patience and many hours of help with this project (in particular with the dilemma of my rear hitch reinstall!)

© Copyright 2000 Andreas Ritterbusch
All Rights reserved.
Photos: Andreas Ritterbusch