Sharing my spare tire with an off road trailer?

I'm having an off-road trailer built to tow behind my Gen1 Tacoma! The trailer weight loaded up will be around 2000lbs. The builder says he can get an axle with a 6 on 5.5" lug pattern. I think this means I can use my truck's spare as a spare for the trailer as well? Anybody have experience with this?

Also I could use recommendations on buying wheels and tires for the trailer. Should I go for a trailer specific wheel/tire?

Here's the tires my truck currently has: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Hankook-Dynapro-A-Tm-RF10-All-Terrain-Tire-265-75R16-114T/570246074

 

Welcome to TW

 

It was quite common for CJ owners to take a wrecked CJ and turn the tub into a trailer. Most of us kept the entire rear axle (with the same ratio as our jeeps) in place as sort of a rolling set of spares. This way we used the same tires on both Jeep and trailer. Not a bad idea. In fact on one occasion we pulled the entire axle off of a trailer and put it under the jeep. A few hours later we were on our way.

 

As long as that axle is hub-centric it will be compatible with your current Tacoma wheels that are 6 x 5.5"

Here's the question though.... If you were to get TWO flats, would you be comfortable leaving the trailer behind and putting your only spare on the truck to get out and fix the other flat then take it back to recover the trailer?

Personally, if I were towing a trailer, I'd have two spares - one for the truck, one for the trailer. Whether or not they are swappable between the two.

 

What I would do is find a set of 4 (or 3) matching wheels to what you currently have on your truck.

Then throw away the stock spare that has the 15" steel wheel and then get matching tires on the 4 "new-to-you" wheels.

Install 2 on the trailer, 1 as your truck spare and 1 as your trailer spare.

Then you can swap all around in your tire rotations and have full-size matching spares if all goes to hell.

 

It works great, I kept my truck spare under the truck to have two spares.

 

That's a good looking trailer.

To my knowledge the biggest difference between vehicle and trailer tires is that trailer tires are built to withstand/support much more weight, for a offroad trailer I dont see why normal vehicle tires/wheels would be as issue, now if you were hauling 4000+ lb of rock through the woods that would be a different story.
Definitely use the same rims as your truck has and have two spares tires, if you have stock rims it should be pretty easy to find takeoff wheels.

 

Using the same size tires on your trailer as your truck then running a spare for each really is the way to go. Take off wheels are a dime a dozen on Craigslist in most places. It seems like a big investment up front but the long term piece of mind and 8 tire rotations mean you will have a long life out of them.

 

When I went with matching wheels, I used spacers to correct off-set and hub-centric that my Tacoma wheels needed. Trailers have no off-set, wheel is centered over the bearing.