Home Forums Gear Hunting Trucks and Four-Wheel Drives Warn winch

wabigoon;
Top of the morning to you sir, hopefully this finds you and yours doing well.

So with the understanding that I'm now at the stage in life where I do everything within my capability to NOT use the winch in the toolbox - here's what I've done and why.

The typical back story with me is that when we started out "serious" 4WD traveling we installed a very heavy duty bush guard/winch mount on our Toyota and quickly went from a far too small 2000lb winch to a 6000lb Warn planetary drive.


So the upside of an open mount like that is you put it where it works best for front end winching - to my mind just above and in front of the front bumper.

The downside includes having the entire unit in the weather all the time, so the solenoids especially take a beating, as does the cable after a few years of road salt.

The next couple of pickups were '87 F150 4x4's - first a regular cab and then an extended cab. I mounted an 8000lb Warn planetary drive in behind the front bumper . We cut an access hole for the fairlead and cable with a plasma cutter so it was behind the front licence plate - which was then mounted on a hinge.

While that did protect the cable and solenoids better, the position is to my mind a wee bit low sometimes for winching. Then too, the last time I used it on the '87 extended cab I really, REALLY wanted to winch out backwards but of course could not.....

So after we tore the tire off off the bead because the only anchor point was almost 90� to the left of the truck - well you get the picture.

The next pickup was a '99 F150 and I decided it would get a QD mount so I could winch out backwards if the situation called for it.

Although you can buy them, I had a welding shop fab up a plate that the winch and fairlead mounted to that also has a universal hitch tubing mount welded beneath it.

Then I installed a front receiver on the pickup and ran heavy cable with welding cable quick disconnects running front and rear on the pickup.


As I'm a "belt and suspenders" sort of guy, I ran both positive and negative cables all the way back to the battery - as in I don't save wire and use the frame for a ground.

I use 2/0 cable too wabigoon - not cheap, but it's not going to burn the winch motor out by starving the amperage either.

The pluses of that sort of mount are that the winch lives in a toolbox in the back of the pickup - safe from the elements and thieves. The solenoids really love it there and when I drag the winch out to the box to test the connections before a major trip it has worked 100% so far.

The minus is that the mounting position on some trucks, like our present '03 Dodge is a wee bit low in my opinion. Older photo here before a whole bunch of additions on that rig.


Lastly I try to always pull on a single wrap on the spool, so that means I use a snatch block and by doing so cut my line speed in half but do double the pull strength.

Really I likely should upgrade the 8000lb Warn shown to a 10,000lb unit for that truck, but I'll likely not do that until I either give this one to one of the girls or get mad at it because it wouldn't extract me even double lining it.

So for your pickup - if it was mine I'd absolutely install a front receiver, then run QD cables front and rear and use at least an 8000lb Warn with the planetary drive like I've got.

Warn offers several levels of performance in their winches these days and if you think you're going to use it quite a bit I'd spring for the Premium line and would consider the Ultimate Performance series too.

Again it's got to pencil out for you when you crunch the cost/benefit all out though and I get that.

Oh, last thought for me is that the next winch I buy WILL have the synthetic cable on it for sure - even if I have to sell a few more Cooey's to finance that.

Hopefully that was useful information for you or someone out there this fine, still Friday morning sir. Have a good one.

Dwayne