There is a lot of information about the Chevrolet spare tire secondary latch, but not much information on how to keep it from happenning again, greasing this thing every month is still no solution.

If you have a chevy express, tahoe, silverado and probably a few other models, you have this problem, and you won't know it until the worst possible time.

I spent three hours getting the spare tire off of a chevy.  Once done, i was not going to put it back up as it was, I wanted to ensure I would never spend 3 hours like that again !

The fix is quite simply to grind off a spot for the secondary latch to "slip" through, so that if it is stuck in the out position you can still get the tire off by rotating the secondary latch until it finds the hole you've cut in the retaining ring.  When putting the tire back up, just turn the secondary latch 180 degrees so that if the cable breaks, the secondary latch will still do it's job.

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