Lessons Learned: Front vs Rear vs Hitch Mounted Winches

The purpose of this post is not to sway you one way or the other, but rather to highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses of each method based upon my experience.

I started off with a traditional bumper mounted winch.



The consequences of doing prerunner stuff on a truck with a plate bumper / winch.



Easily enough repaired and improved.



Eventually led to ditching the plate bumper for a prerunner style tube bumper with a hidden hitch behind it. In hindsight, I'm not sure if this was the right direction to take the build (full long travel) - but what's done is done.



After ditching the plate bumper, I moved the winch to the rear of the truck by fabricating a custom mount on the front side (side towards center of the truck) of the hitch receiver. This was a great location in that the weight was not over the front end and the winch did not take up any space. I remotely mounted the solenoid box in one of the bed pockets. Was quite the project, as things were a very tight fit.

You can see the aluminum hawse under the spare tire in this picture:





http://[ATTACH=full]1699621[/ATTACH]Ran this set up for a few years. Used the winch a dozen times during this time period, and experienced difficulty with the winch (due to dirty connections) about 30% of the time. Sometimes catastrophically (total winch failure). The amount of water, snow, and mud the winch was exposed to in this position was just too much of a liability against reliable operation.

The most recent adventure in which the rear mounted winch decided that acting up was the right thing to do at the moment. Quite frustrating.

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So, last night I stripped out the rear mounted winch. I left the 1/0 gauge pos/neg wires run to the rear and will equip them with quick disconnect ends. Tonight, I decided a fresh start was in order and ordered a new winch. The plan is for this winch to live in the bed of the truck, under a cover, mounted to the bed cage. This should significantly help with not playing the "what the *&% is wrong with the winch this time" game.

I'm a bit worried about the torque that a side pull will put on a hitch receiver. Very worried. Planning to make the carrier / mount have multiple mounting holes drilled so that I can get it as snug as possible to the bumpers. Will probably have to adjust the rear tire carrier to facilitate this.

So... there you have it. I've done it from the front, I've done it from the back, and now I want to leave it in the bed until I decide what end to stick it into

We will see how this goes. Hopefully the receivers hold up to the load / torque placed on them.

 

Thanks for the info, I've got some things to consider.