Will a regular tire fit into the spare tire well? There seems to be extra room. An alternative is this, from Amazon.

 

My steelies are in storage until winter so I can't physically go check right now, but it seems like there ought to be enough room. There won't be enough room for the tool kit and foam, though, so unless it ended up being the exact proper height you'd have to fabricate a plywood or similar trunk floor. That, or accept not being able to carry heavy cargo that might bend or break the existing floor.

I went the plywood route, and it was a pain in the butt. Worth it once finished, but a lot of work the way I wanted it.

 

@hasdrubal I like it, great job! What was painful about it? Stenciling the right shape?
​​​​​​What's with the metal(?) strips going lengthwise on the carpet?

 

A bit of everything, actually. Getting the right shape wasn't too bad. Cardboard template I was too impatient to search for the right glue, so I used the best thing I had on hand to attach the felt. That turned out to be a tube of roofing patch adhesive that smelled of tar for several weeks. No smell now, but it took a lot longer to dry than I thought it would. I didn't want to leave a big gap between the hinged panel and the surrounding material, but the felt was kind of fuzzy on the edges and it still snags a bit. Hard to trim without sanding, but that would expose the plywood and require touching up the paint.

The strips were something I think I saw in plastic on my first car, a Peugeot 405 wagon. Might have been one of the other wagons my dad had over the years, but the idea was to let cargo items slide fore/aft more freely when loading, and not slide so much side to side. The sideways movement was my main goal, because I was afraid of tearing the felt, especially at the edges of each panel. Each of those has the screws countersunk to avoid catching on anything, so that took a while.

 

Good job! It's nice to see a lot of thought going into a project ahead of time instead of just trying to slap something together.

 

That's beautiful! How thick is the plywood? I also have sound deadening material down there, but it covers the entire spare well.

 

Thanks for the kind words, and it's 1/2" plywood. There's also some 2" wide aluminum pieces screwed onto the underside of the stationary part, so the hinged part has a hard stop.

I thought about adding more of the sound deadening stuff, but I had read that it does most of its work by damping vibrations in sheet metal. The claim was that you get diminishing returns after covering 30% of any surface unless you're going to add another layer of some special foam, and I didn't think it would be vibrating too much there with all the contouring of the metal. Not sure how true that is, but I was also coming to the end of the roll.