Home Forums Gear Hunting Trucks and Four-Wheel Drives Affordable winch or come along?

Got my jeep stuck as heck at my farm sunday afternoon. Ended up missing the first half of the super bowl and pixxing off mama while i walked two miles and found the local farmer with a 4WD tractor.

Decided a "come along" would be smart to keep under the back seat of the jeep.

Dont want chinese junk and want it heavy duty enough and with a long enough cable to winch out my wrangler unlimited

Any recommendations?

Of course i will probably never get stuck again once i have a way to get myself out...that jeep as seen some rough stuff the last 3 years and this is the first time i was ever close to being really stuck, and boy was i

If you end up buying new head to tractor supply, or northern tool

I have a Hi Lift jack for off road use. It can also be used as a come along, if needed.
They are not cheap, but they last a long time. IMHO, it's a must have while driving off road.

http://www.hi-lift.com/

That thing does look pretty slick. Watched a youtube video of it being used as a winch

When I was young and tough, I used Hi-Lift jacks, Pow'r Pullers and even Spanish windlasses made with tow chains. It was a lot of fun, and even moderately satisfying, once I got things going again. However, if I were you, I would start looking on Craig's List for a deal on a winch. Lots of guys try to go cheap with a 5,000-lb winches and find that it won't cut the mustard with their F 250s and Chevy/GM 2500s. With a CJ 5 or older, a 5,000-lb winch will do just about anything you need except pull you back up a sheer cliff--and if you're at the bottom, the winch probably is not what you need most at that point.

We had a 2,000 lb Warne PTO winch on a 1943 Coast Guard Jeep back in the day, and we thought that we were ready to tackle anything. It got us of out of a lot of places we should never have been in the first place.

A Hi-lift can pull 7000lb which will move a pretty heavy truck. Few Come-alongs have a pull more than 4000lb and that's with a built in pulley. The problem with the Hi-lift is it's length of pull. You only have maybe 3' and if you use a strap with some stretch, you'll only get a 1 to 2' before having to stop and readjust.

That's exactly right rock chuck. For that reason I like to use chains when pulling with a hi-lift type jack.

Here's a picture I've tossed up in the past, me and my boy pulling our way through a tough spot with a jack. (I didn't have enough chain along on this day )







I've destroyed many cheap cable come alongs over the years. That being said, all of them paid for themselves many times over before they were finally terminally load tested.

A cheap come along don�t take up much room and I�ve always thought of them as sort of a disposable emergency tool.

My current play truck has an old Belleview 6000 model electric winch, probably a late 60�s unit. Warn purchased the Belleview design and company I believe (early 70�s?), they rebadged the belleview 6000 as the Warn M8000 (apparently belleview seriously under rated the winch.)

It�s a tough old work horse with a hundred feet of 3/8� cable on the spool. I�ve upgraded the controls a bit and it�s proven to be very useful on several occasions now.

For a hand winch alternative look at a Wyeth-Scott. They are the toughest thing out there and much more compact than the typical fence stretch/comealong. It is built of cast/forged iron with a demountable handle with 3/8 inch cable.

A lever block chain puller is a bad mo-fo too, and will take up very little room in the truck. But, you don't want to fill them with mud.

I have and use high lift with my jeep. Saved my bacon many times. Got a come along from TSC too - it was a piece of crap.

Luckily enough I scored USA made come along from fifties at a yard sale. WOW! Aluminum piece, strong as an ox and quality you would not believe. Use it more than anything now.

And I thought we were talking about affordable wenches...

There are affordable wenches on the market...assuming you can escape the next morning with your wallet...and can avoid mind numbing doctor bills.

There ya go.

http://www.wyeth-scott.com/

been thinking bout one for awhile.....

Note this from their website: "2 ton and 3 ton capacity (dead lift rating)"
Deadlift means that it will LIFT 2 or 3 tons. Almost all winches are rated for a rolling load. They will say the capacity is 10,000lb but that doesn't mean it will lift 10k. It means that it will pull a 10k load up a 20% or so angle. That's a huge difference from dead lift.
If you look at the specs on this one, they say that the rating for a rolling load is double the deadlift rating. So, the 3 ton model will pull 12,000lb, same as a winch for a big pickup.

im aware of all that.....always thought the above would be handier than a winch....not as easy to use due to it being human powered but fairly easily portable at less than 30 pounds, you can attach it where you need it and not limited to one or two mounted spots plus its built hella stout and should last forever....

In my earlier life as a state forester every truck had a Wyeth-Scott and they got used year round. Tough and handy.

Cabela's used to sell something similar, but it was set up like a capstan winch..evidently it didn't sell as they dropped it after a year or two..I thought it would have been very handy for dragging a deer carcass out of a steep valley or simlar..

You mean like a rope-along? (http://www.outfitterspackstation.com/ropealong.html)

Pretty handy, for smallish loads (obviously, you are not going to be pulling as much weight as with cable). Also, very sensitive to rope diameter. If the rope is not right, it will hold for a bit and then let go. And it isn't fun when it lets go.

I have one of those that I've had for more than 20 years. When I got mine, they called it a Rope Puller. They've also raised the ratings a bit. Mine is 1000lb.
They work fine within their ratings. You need a twisted rope, not braided. The pulley is designed for the twists on the rope to fall into grooves to get traction.

Its not heavy enough to use for vehicles. It would work great on an ATV. Other than that, it's too light for much of anything. I used it to pull over some trees I was cutting down. One was leaning the wrong way and it worked fine for that.