HF winches

[smichaelR22]

well i have now lost confidence in my HF winch.

yes scott you can now rub it in and i take it back, dont buy one.

after fixing the blower switch on the scrambler today and then fiddling with some other electrical gremlins i notice my newly transplanted winch was not working....  HF 10K winch about a year old maybe less....  

traced it down to the motor not the supply or switch box.  open the back of the motor up and among nasty black grit and chunks of stuff I found some crispy fried wires to the brushes.  gona see if i can fix it, but im not very hopeful.....

moral is, buy a real winch next time :)

but i have to admit, the dozen or so times it saved me was worth the 370$ and year of use i got out of it.....

[Guest]

:whoa:

[smichaelR22]

well after i cleaned most of the crud out, and found it was not a broken wire, but rather some sort of large capacitor across the power poles that had exploded off and one of the leads had shorted out one of the 4 brushes so it wasnt working right or something.  cleaned it all out, removed the blasted cap and wires and put it all backtogether.  i didnt expect it to work, so i will take it apart tomorrow and do it right and re oil somethings.  im sure the cap was some sort of electical muffler, useless... (sparky people cringe now).  but it works now, makes some neat grinding noises from the crud i desturbed inbetween the magnets and armature.

[meangreen]

I have had my hf winch for 3 year and it still works great. I use it on my trailer for towing up cars and brocken jeeps. when I first bought it I paied the $35 to insure it for two years if you had done that you could of got a brand new one. just bring it in and say it dosen\'t work and they just give you another one.

[smichaelR22]

that might have been a wise thing to do at the time.  but i still think as long as you dont submerge the thing a few times and actually use it alot like i did they probably are descent winches for the price.  

i spent  the morning today pulling it all apart and removing chunks of magnets from the housing.  aparently the grinding noise was one of the four case magnets that came loose and a couple pieces broke off.  removed what i could, cleaned and re epoxyed what was left (80% or so of the original magnet) to the case and cleaned and re lubed everything.  the chunks that broke off broke alot of wires in the back windings, but its a quad, so the few loops broken on the outer level shouldnt matter much...     got it all back together sounds like new actually, see how she does i guess.

if anyhting, i could convert it to pnumatic or hydralic, since the input is a 3/8\" socket drive, and even with a cheap air rachet driving it was feeding pretty good

[MrMindless]

pneumatic

now there\'s an interesting idea....

[smichaelR22]

i thought about it, but you would need a descent compressor to have enough volume to power a small impact gun or like what i was using an air ratchet....

id want something that i could pull at least 25\' of cable and not have the compressor work very hard to keep up... be nice for air tools and tires though on the trail...

[MassiveAttack]

oh yea, pneumatic would be interesting. We have several locomotives down in Olean that are air start. It\'s very powerful, but I\'m not sure that it would be good for winches. To get the motor started you needed to really get high RPMs on the air start. They had a lot of speed, but lacked any torque. They also will stall pretty easy if they\'re slowed by a heavy load. In any case, it would be great to try and see if it works.

Remember too, electric is not only easy to get power to, but by nature an electric motor will develop more power as the increased load slows it down. The only limiting factor is the amount of current the wires can supply and the motor can handle. It\'s the opposite with any other form of power (IC or air) that would be on a jeep.