Quote:
Originally Posted by jage
Quote:
Originally Posted by aluminess
I attached some instructions about how to clock the winch to mount to the current mounting holes that are in the bumper.
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Is it safe to clock a winch that was made to mount feet first? I'm not clear on how it's ultimately mounted into the bumper- 4 grade 8 bolts at 4468 lbs each is barely 16K and that's straight shear, nothing complex.
But just fitting the holes and having strong enough bolts was never the issue as I understood it- the front of the housing case is made to withstand the force. If you clock it so the force of the drum goes against one of the other walls then you're defeating the purpose of the front feet mount, no? If Warn or other manufacturers designed the tertiary casing walls to withstand the full force of the drum under load- why make it foot first mount anyway, why doesn't Warn just put 6 bolts in the foot plate and call it a day? It would fit a lot more applications that way.
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You are correct about the sheer of the bolts when it is bolted through the bottom. We also provide a bracket that attaches the winch to our back plate with a couple more bolts. So in addition to the 4 bolts through the bottom, you also have 2 more bolts through the back. With this design the winch helps to strengthen the bumper by creating another spot where the bottom and back plates are tied together, and it also takes stress off of the four bolts that mount through the bottom.
We have put winches mounted like this to the test. One of our customers got buried in some thick mud on a beach up to his axles, and instead of digging he decided that he would just try and winch himself out. He broke the steal cable and had zero problems with the way the winch was mounted. Pictures of how stuck he was can be seen on our website here.
http://aluminess.com/winches.htm
Warn makes foot down mounted winches in the 12k lbs rating that fit in our bumper with no problems. With one of those winches and a snatch block you can get yourself out of pretty much anywhere. Some people insist on a 16.5 winch so we did a bunch of research and came up with the solution above.