Winching
Purchasing, Setting Up, and Using
By Jerry Smith
Part 1
Winches and winching are something that can be highly technical if you are into some intense 4-wheeling. Choosing the right winch for your intended use can be easy or difficult. Money is often the first obstacle you must overcome.
Money to buy a winch is not always an easy find. I remember buying my first winch. Not long after spending a large pile of hard earned cash on my first new Jeep, a 1973 CJ5 with no top to save some initial money and to be able to later buy a new Bestop because I liked the features better than the stock top, I began looking at my options for buying and installing a winch.
I purchased the CJ5 in late October. Living in western Montana that late in the year, riding around in an open top Jeep could be considered a bit insane. I quickly determined that a top would be firmly on the top of my “accessory” list.
By mid-December, I had finally saved enough to order a new Bestop from our only 4-wheel drive shop. When it finally arrived, I found out that the installation instructions had one caveat… install it on a warm, 70-degree plus day. Those temps were still several months away and the 17-mile drive to work every morning was proving to be brutal.
I found that installing a new Bestop in 30-degree weather to be one great challenge, but it turned out that it could be done.
In 1973, there was no internet. Information about winches for a Jeep was by word of mouth from mostly inexperienced people. Just finding a source of winches was difficult, and finding good info on buying a quality winch, what size, and if and what accessories were available was quite a feat.
At the time, I worked as a heavy equipment mechanic for a Caterpillar dealer that sold cable and accessories, so sourcing the accessories was a no-brainer. Having already installed new Hyster winches on log skidders and Caterpillar equipment gave me some background on the intricacies of that operation.
When the money was available and the decision of which winch to buy were finally made, I ordered a new Ramsey 8000# electric winch. That’s when I found that the Jeep was not set up with a platform to simply install the winch.
A friend who had an older CJ5 had a homemade PTO winch on the front. His father, who owned a truck repair shop, had built the bumper from some old truck frame, which had proven to be substantial, so we copied some of that bumper, and created an integrated winch mount and bumper for the Ramsey.
That Ramsey winch proved to be a most reliable, very useful and often used Jeep accessory. I could now go places that most of my club members would not follow.
Over the years, we moved many downed trees from trails. More than once, we removed large rocks from the road and pulled others or me out of what we had gotten ourselves into. We had pulled fence posts, tightened fences, and all sorts of odd jobs. That winch proved to be one of the best investments I ever made.
One thing I found about the Ramsey electric winch that always bothered me was how slow it was. It seemed like watching paint dry as the winch pulled in what seemed like inches of cable. Rewinding the cable after use was something I came to dread and often just wrapped the cable around the bumper.
When the need for a new winch for a new Jeep came along many years later, knowledge of winching, how to choose a new winch, and the technology in winches had vastly improved. Options were now available on the Internet that made the choices easier and more difficult.
I knew what I wanted in a winch, but because the availability of installing a Power-Take-Off (PTO) on the transfer case was no longer an option, I looked for a winch capable of pulling all day if the need came along. More than once I had the need to pull long distances… like 100+ feet. Once I winched off a snowy, off-camber shelf road for nearly 1/4–mile. I also wanted one with a higher speed of recovery if possible.
All those wants pointed the way to a hydraulically driven winch. The power steering pump could supply the hydraulics, so the source of power already existed. The heating problem an electrical winch created would be alleviated, and I found a winch with a two-speed retrieval capability.
The Mile Marker hydraulically driven winch was a military proven winch. Being a military vet, I knew that the military can tear apart an anvil barehanded, so if the winch could stand up to them, I had little to worry about. Over a ten-year period of fairly intense use, I can honestly say that I have zero complaints with the Mile Marker winch.
(Well… maybe one. Remembering which lever belongs in which direction for high and low speed can be a long learning process.)
Over the years, I have found that there are some little things you can do to improve the operation of your electric winch. Electrical winches are a heat-building machine. Heat and electrical energy are the greatest of enemies. As the temperature rises, the demand for more power is increased. That demand causes the temperature to rise even more… and the process continues until something fails. This is NOT a good system.
Many of the newer winches have sensors that will shut the winch down when the temperatures reach critical numbers. Once that happens, you must wait until the winch cools down to continue.
There are two things you can do to help this problem.
The first is to take the cables that come with a new winch and throw them away or recycle them. Those are just extended battery cables to be able to reach from the battery to the winch. The average battery cable is a stranded heavy copper wire with a non-conductive coating.
Battery cable is made for short, heavy electrical loads… such as starting an engine. If you hold a battery cable in your bare hand under load, you can feel it building heat. As it heats up, less amperage can flow through the wire. This causes it to heat even more, which reduces the amperage the starting motor (or winch motor) is demanding. In the case of the winch, heat reduces the pulling power, the opposite of what you want from a winch.
The easy fix for this problem is to replace the heavy battery cable with a length of welding cable. Think about it this way… welding is a long-term heat process. You are literally melting metal to join two surfaces together. That welding cable is made to carry high amperage for long durations. If you winch for any distance, your winch needs all the power that battery can supply. Why not supply the maximum amperage while reducing the heat build up??
The next possible way to enhance the use of an electric winch is to shorten the length of steel cable or synthetic rope on the drum. A shorter rope requires fewer layers of rope on the drum. Fewer layers actually increase the pulling power of your winch.
The majority of pulls with a vehicle winch are of short distances. Sometimes, just a few inches or feet will get you back underway. Most of the time, the anchor you pull from is not all that far away from the winch. All that extra rope is dead weight and of little value.
For those instances where you need a longer winch line, carry a length of rope as an extension. Learn how to use the extension to the length you need without tying it in permanent knots. You can carry as much extension rope as you feel comfortable with or can afford.
Your battery and charging system will love you if you do both. They will not need to produce as much energy to do the same job.
Your winch will love you also. It will not heat nearly as much because it will be operating at a lower rate of pull.
In part two of this series, we’ll talk about how to choose the right winch for your rig.
