# Lowering the spare tire, Lincoln Navigator



## Brainbucket

Your lucky. I generally have to cut the cable and replace the spare tire hoist. Lube the hell out of it.:vs_cool:


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## r0ckstarr

About a year ago, I saw my neighbor in his driveway trying to pull something out from under his wife's Chrysler minivan. I thought it was a trash can lid, and walked over to offer to help. 

As it turns out, Chrysler put the spare under the front seats of the van. You winch it down with a crank rod that is stored under the hood. The winch spot is in the floor between the front seats. The spare tire has a plastic cover over it. 

His wife ran something over, which pulled and folded the plastic cover backwards, and was dragging on the ground stuck between the spare tire and the road, while still attached to the spare tire. 

We tried ramps and a jack, but just couldn't get the van up high enough to be able to fold the plastic cover back. Because the cover was stuck touching the road, we couldn't get the spare to lower down enough to unhook it. We fought with it for an hour before he decided to take it to a shop with a lift.


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## Dave Sal

I would never buy a vehicle that carries the spare under the vehicle. You will always need it in the middle of the night during a blizzard, and it will be covered in frozen mud and require you to lay down in the snow / slush to get it, but only if you can manage to unfreeze the mechanism enough to get it to work. Besides, there are people out there that will simply climb underneath with a pair of cable cutters and will steal your new spare tire. Happened to my wife who worked the midnight shift at a hospital. She came home one day and I happened to notice something hanging down under the rear of her SUV. That turned out to be the remains of the cut cable.


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## Gymschu

This is a big problem with GMC trucks. The spare is under the truck bed. It has that same long-armed crank handle that Bigplanz spoke of. Problem is, the GMC's have a defect/engineering problem in that there is a lip that actually holds the tire in place in case the cranking mechanism fails and the tire falls loose onto the road. On many GMC's, you can't get the spare loose enough for the spare to get free of the lip so you can't get the spare off. There are dozens of YouTube videos on how to get it off. I've tried almost all of them and still can't get the spare off.


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## Bigplanz

The Olds Silhouette and Mercury Villager I used to have and my wife's Windstar all stow the spare under the vehicle and use a variation of the crank mechanism in the Nav/Expedition. The Nav is the only one of the three with the full size spare. The others are donut spares. It's an ok design, i guess, for a car that never leaves a paved road, but it would be a mega-drag if you were using it off road and got a flat.


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## Mort

They should all be under the hood like the old Subarus.


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## Dave Sal

Gymschu said:


> This is a big problem with GMC trucks. The spare is under the truck bed. It has that same long-armed crank handle that Bigplanz spoke of. Problem is, the GMC's have a defect/engineering problem in that there is a lip that actually holds the tire in place in case the cranking mechanism fails and the tire falls loose onto the road. On many GMC's, you can't get the spare loose enough for the spare to get free of the lip so you can't get the spare off. There are dozens of YouTube videos on how to get it off. I've tried almost all of them and still can't get the spare off.


Have you tried to deflate the tire? Maybe letting all the air out will allow some movement of the rubber enough where you can yank it off the lip.


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## Gymschu

Dave Sal said:


> Have you tried to deflate the tire? Maybe letting all the air out will allow some movement of the rubber enough where you can yank it off the lip.


Now, Dave, that may just end up being PURE GENIUS. I will give that a try!


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