Advice on Winch on F250

Hi GoneTroppo

We had a similar debate with ourselves, including discussions with people in the winch business, and in the end decided to keep the 9,000 lb Warn from the Patrol and have now fitted this. This included advice from our son, who is young enough to go looking for trouble, and then winch himself out (although once he did need to go and get a backhoe from his place of work to dig his 4wd up). We plan to get a heavy duty snatch block; this was on our shopping list before, but we never got one.

As we do not go looking for trouble, the winch is just as an insurance should we find ourselves somewhat bogged. In these circumstances, we anticipate unhitched the caravan and recovering vehicle then caravan separately.

The weight of the 9,000 lb made no perceivable difference to driving either the
Patrol or the F250. We have not towed with the F250 as yet.

We have the TJM 15,000lb winch and have no idea what the weight is, but we did not notice any difference with the driving after fitting it.

The only problem with the winch is that the cable winds in slower than the 9000 lb winches do, which probably has something to do with lower gearing of the more powerful winch.

Our son in law wanted to pull a tree out at their place and we hooked up the 9000lb winch on their Landcruiser to it. The tree didn't budge. So we replaced the Toyota with the F250 and 15,000 lb winch and it pulled the tree over with ease. I know we could have used the snatch block on the smaller winch, but we wanted to do a comparision of the two.

Brian

Hi Gone Troppo,

I have just fitted a Warn 15000lb winch together with a ARB steel bull bar and I am at present obtaining all the weights for all the equipment fitted to my F250 (which you can view under my members list). I have not used it as of yet but like most boggers say it is there for insurance, like the old saying "if you have one you will probably never need it, but if you don't you probably will" a bit like carrying spares for the truck.

The reason I went for the 15000lb winch was for the fact that the F250 is a large vehicle and when towing our 21' BT I am 15 metres long (just under 50 feet) and once I obtain all the relevant weights I will weigh everything fully loaded to see if I go over my GVM and need a engineers upgrade compliance plate and I will probably fit the new OME suspension kit just released for the F250, once ARB have ironed out a couple of problems with it at this stage.

Be prepared for the worst case senario as with the big F250 you will have to rely of being fully self recoverable, as a smaller 4WD will probably not be able to pull you out, depending on how bad you are stuck, as you will probably have to disconnect the BT as has been mentioned because of the combined weight depending on size of BT and what you carry. But lets concentrate on the truck alone.

Now back to the 15000lb winch which is a single line pull of 6803.886kg (15,000lb) worst case not using a snatch for a double line pull as this is a bonus, and as the F250 has a kerb weight of 3198kg and a GVM of 4200kg that leaves you 2603.886kg leeway. As we all know we load our vehicles up, as for mine just with the extra fuel, water, winch, bar, roller draw system I am near 3700kg and thats without anything else.

Now a 9000lb winch gives you a single line pull of 4082.331kg so if you load up the F250 to its legal GVM of 4200kg then you are over the limit. Bear in mind they probably rate their winches without any resistance, on a flat surface, not like being bogged in deep sand or stuck with the tide suction as mentioned and then the extra 2603kg of leeway on the 15000lb winch is dwindled down.

I was stuck at well 52 on the CSR right in the middle back in 1994 because it was under water but I had to say I had been to every well, but 8 hours, 3 vehicles as anchor points, 2 tow straps and 1 winch later I was free. Also once I had to recover a Army Unimog that I had driven into a place of no return and 24 hours later winching up hills recovered it, so bigger the better in my book.

Like I say prepare for the worst and be pleasantly surprised when you don't use it or glad that you did when you do need it.

Cheers
Stewart

Thanks everyone for your feedback, I guess it confirms what I had been thinking.
"The bigger winch so as to have a safety margin."

To reduce weight I'll probaly fit plasma rope rather than steel cable which will reduce weight by up to 20KG or so. (that's what I've been told need to do a bit more research yet)

Stewart, your measurments are very interesting as I have a custom tray body on mine plus other mods so I'll have the tape measure out tomorrow for a comparo.

The OME suspension sounds interesting, last time I asked about it there was nothing coming so they must have had second thoughts. It may even cure it from wandering around on the straight.
Do you know any more about it ?

Chris