It's Pulling For You

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Help for the rural driver's winch-hunt.

Somehow, it's always easier to get yourself into a hole than out of one. One backcountry wit, having spent most of his life waiting for the state to pave his road, passed the remainder wondering why people were so eager to get off of it. His observation regarding off=road motoring was capsulized in one sentence: "Four-wheel drive will get you into trouble, but it takes a winch to get you out."

A winch? That distinctly all-business rigging that squats on the front of pickup trucks? You bet. Because even if gathering firewood is the extent of your of roading-or even if your rural existence is limited to weekends in the woods-a winch, caref;illy tailored to your needs and to the vehicle you drive, may be the most useful country companion you can have pulling for you.

Forget the transmission-driven monsters of a generation ago. Today's electric winches are compact, convenient and unobtrusive. Some can even be hidden completely behind the original factory bumpers. But before we get into what they are, let's look at what they can do.

Most people are familiar with a tow truck winch. It's really a portable windlass built for hauling and lifting. Not so a vehicle winch, which is meant for pulling a load across a more or less horizontal surface. That's not to say that overhead lifting is beyond its ability, but most manufacturers would prefer that users leave that job to hoists, which are designed with safety features specific to overhead work.

Even so, a winch is more productive than you might imagine. Besides its obvious usehauling other vehicles or the vehicle it's attached to out of impossible situations-a winch can pull firewood up slopes and out of slippery spots, yank stubborn stumps and snags from fields or lake beds, stretch cable or fence wire tight as you please, raise gin poles or structural members at construction sites or drag heavy loads from where you don't want them to where you do.

Mounted at the rear or behind the cab of a truck, the same machine can help skid loads onto a trailer or into the bed. And, when used with pulley blocks and clevises, it can double the power of the pull or exert force at right angles to the normal direction of travel.

The fact that a 60-pound device can move 100 times its weight with ease is strong testimony to the potential of gear reduction. Virtually all winches use similar engineering principles, but apply them in different ways. Typically, an electric motor, powered by the vehicle's battery, drives a shaft connected to the winch transmission. That gear train is linked, often through a clutch, to the drum that wraps the cable.

The type of gearing arrangement used is generally matched to the winch's workload. Most traditional is the worm-gear drive: tough as nails, but demanding a lot from the motor because of friction losses in sliding gear surfaces. Paul Haugtvedt of the Oklahoma-based Ramsey Winch Company estimates the worm drive to be about 40°70 efficient-considerably less than the 70°70 efficiency of the firm's more modern rolling planetary gears. Other types being used include spur gears-an uncomplicated and reliable power transmission method-and cycloidal gearing, which is about midway in efficiency between worm drive and planetary designs.