I've had a Mantec swing away wheel carrier, fitted to a Land Rover Defender, for several years. A similar design is now sold by Britpart. The Mantec wheel carrier has worked well. It's a nice robust structure and opens with the door.
To allow it to swing with the rear tail door, the original design uses a large plastic plunger. This works well to allow the wheel carrier to move with the door but has the disadvantage that unless it is exactly aligned, the carrier will lift the door off its hinges. This happened to ours when it was moved to another Land Rover.
That got me thinking and I came up with a design that slides in both directions, so the door position is not influenced by the carrier at all.
A friend made up a couple of jigs from my designs and pressed the more difficult parts in his workshop.
I put them together in my shed. I cut the two plastic sliders from some 10mm thick nylon like material I had bought many years ago for another project.
The carrier needs two 9mm holes drilled. These need to be along the same centre line that the original plunger fitted. This is easy to find by looking at the oval hole in the end plate, where the plunger used to bolt through.
It took a little experimenting to work out the easiest way to get the nuts on in that confined space. For me, the best method was to loosely attach the larger strap to the carrier first and then put the nuts on the door side.
I've fitted it to two cars and, so far, it's worked very well.
The carrier does not need any alignment when fitting so everything can be bolted up tight, as you go.
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(C) Copyright 2022, John C Brown.
Please ask permission before using this design.
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