Originally Posted by Bayou Boy

Most of the time you size a winch for double your vehicle’s weight or 1.5 times the GVWR. Why did you go with the “small” 16500lb Warn on a 30000 pound truck? Couldn’t you have used some kind of PTO or hydraulic winch that would actually be useful in a self recovery. I can’t help but think that that Warn would only be useful in the recovery of another much smaller vehicle.

Bayou,

You raise a very good point that we thought quite a bit about. My original plans was for a hydraulic or PTO winch. We decided to go this route because:

HYDRAULIC – Would have been a pain because the truck has no existing hydraulics (air brakes, air suspension, no hydraulic pump) so the weight & complexity of adding it would have out-weighed (har har!) the benefits.

PTO – The used, non-emission trucks we found didn’t have a PTO on them. I understand from CAT that this can be added after-market, by changing the crankcase I think. However, the people I’ve spoken to suggested that PTO is not a great option for winching because you are solely reliant on the winch and cannot engage the drive to help wheel out of a sticky situation. (The way you would with an electric or hydraulic winch)

WARN – We’re thinking that the truck is going to come in around 22,000lbs. If we ALWAYS double back the winch wire with a pulley that gets us a capacity of 33,000lbs at half the speed. It’s not the 2x rating that you suggested, but it should still get us about 1.5x which I think wil be ok.

Ideally, the winch will be a ‘last resort’ and we will rely on the kindness of fellow ExPo travellers and a tow strap, if we can…

No matter how you cut it though, it’s a big truck and if those 42″ 4×4 wheels do get stuck, chance are we’re going to be really stuck…