Since I broke my winch during an event by the Land Cruiser Club I never looked at it again and it was basically a heavy weight on the front bumper. This obviously needed to change. I don’t really see a need for a winch for the kind of traveling I do so the options are to repair it against minimal costs, or ditch the whole thing and lose some weight from the front bumper as an added benefit. Replacing it with an other winch is not what I was intended to do.
The first problem with the winch is that there is too much rope on it. Not when you wind up the rope evenly across the winch, but when the rope is not evenly distributed the rope can clog up the limited space and get stuck. This is exactly what happened during the Land Cruiser Club event. During winching Brutus out of a mud pool the rope got stuck and the forces of the winch broke some connecting rod in the winch housing.
The second problem I discovered during removing the winch is that there seemed to be a breaker installed under the hood, one I was not aware of, in between the minus cable. Since the braker was not shorted at the Land Cruiser Club event, and the winch is connected to the chassis, all currents were forced to take the chassis route. During high load this actually resulted in a flash and a bang from between the bumper. The winch worked during low load, which was why I never found out about the breaker.
Obviously a breaker needs to be installed in between the positive cable, in this case the winch does not work at all when the breaker is not shorted.
The third problem is that the rope guide on the bumper does not fit, causing unnecessary wear of the winch rope.
The last problem, or rather inconvenience, was that the connector for the winch remote is somewhere in between the bumper and winch housing, making it troublesome to connect the winch remote. This is especially the case when in water or, even worse, mud.
For now I have removed the winch and all cabling and I’ll continue the actual repair on a later date.