Someone is perhaps being a bit over clever with interpretation of
specifications. Warn recommends www.warn.com selecting a winch with a
rating of 1.5 times the weight of your vehicle. No where does it say a 9000
lb winch is capable of lifting a dead weight of 9000 lbs. Rather the winch
is designed to pull the rolling resistance of a 6000 lbs vehicle that's
stuck. The dead lift design load of such a winch is more likely in the
neighborhood of 1800 lbs (about 20 percent of the 9000 lb rating) plus a
significant safety margin.
Warn has been around awhile and I'm sure they have some awareness of product
liability safety issues. Their recommendation for sizing a winch to your
vehicle is probably adequate for 99.9 percent of the times you need a winch.
And I bet that somewhere in the users manual it strongly urges you not to
try an hang your vehicle over a cliff by that little piece of wire rope
despite what you read in "The Monkey Wrench Gang" (by Edward Abby, fun book
but I digress).
I'm neither affiliated with Warn nor do I own any of their products. I do
have something called a come-along, rated to pull 2500 lbs (with a bold face
warning not to try and lift a dead weight of more then 500 lbs) which has
been adequate to unstick both my jeep and pickup truck thus far. Personally
I think winches belong in the same catagory as seatbelts and airbags.
Devices that will give a novice driver a hugely undeserved sense of
security.
I find the come-along a very useful item to have. It is small, light,
inexpensive and easily attached to either end of the vehicle (winches are
usually mounted on the wrong end - having gotten into the snowbank I want to
back out, not get pulled over it just to turn around and get pulled back
over it again to get home!:)
Perhaps someone with more mechanical engineering knowledge would care to
comment.
Regards to all Lou
---- Original Message -----
From: <M35products@aol.com>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2001 2:51 PM
Subject: [MV] winch report
> www.winchtest.com
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 05 2001 - 00:40:34 PDT