'00 F350 SuperDuty

Warn 12,000lbs Winch

Not a lot of rigs are big enough to pull out a 9,000lbs dually truck, so I figure it's a good idea to be able to do it myself. Actually there's two primary reasons I've got it besides those. A truck this equipped ought to be able to do whatever sort of work comes along, wether it be pulling stuck cars out of sand or snow, dragging trees out of the road, or moving anything else that's not where it should be. The other thing is that I haul a lot of cars on my tild-bed trailer, so this is aa real lhandy thing to have for pulling them up there. That said, it needs to be portable enough to go from truck to trailer, yet be strong enough and have the hookups to make it work. Also, with a truck this big you need a winch big enough to move it in the event it does get stuck. The rule is 1.5 times your dead weight, and at the time, 12,000 was the biggest to be had. Now there's 15k that's identical to this one, but with a slightly lower gear and thicker (and shorter) cable. A big consideration for me was the length of the cable. I frequent the beach, and I like to keep the heavy truck a safe distance from the soft stuff, but be able to reach all the kids stuck up to their ground effects. This one's got 125 feet, one of the longest (if not THE longest) you'll find. Plus it's heavy 3/8" cable instead of the usual little 5/16". Also a big consideration.

How to make it portable. I have heavy duty receiver hitches at both the front and rear of the truck, easy enough. So I built a mount for the winch that sits on a 2" slide in, this way it can be moved to the front, the rear, or the front of the trailer bed which I welded a receiver onto. Note the hitch pin lock. You've have to be stupid to run around with this thing not secured somehow. A good quality lock, combined with the fact that when it's on the truck it's tucked up under the bumpers making it real tough to reach, keeps me from worrying about it. Other than that, we have insurance which translates into a new 15k'r.

A small problem. I have my front license plate mounted on a 2" slide-in that I normally keep in the front receiver. What to do when carrying the winch? I welded a small, lightweight receiver tube onto the side of the winch mount, so I can just slide it in there when the winch is on the bumper. No problem. This little receiver has unexpectedly come in handy a couple of times, I can mount the winch to the rear of the truck, and hook a trailer to the winch if the trailer I'd using doesn't have provisions for it.

Then, it's how to power it. I picked up a few sets of the heavy-duty disconnects that are commonly used with winches and high-draw charging applications (eg. forklifts). There are no male/female parts, both sides are interchangable. I put about a 1' lead off the winch with a disconnect on it, so there's no long cables to drag around or tuck away. Then I ran a set of #2 cables from the driver's side battery straight down under the bumper, with a disconnect on it. When the winch isn't connected, it's just short enough that it stays tucked up behind the bumper. The leads are just long enough so they connect up clear of the bumper without hanging down.

Then in the rear I did the same thing, ran a #2 cable the length of the truck but this time only the positive side, and came off of the passenger side battery instead. A good solid ground was made up behind the bumper to the frame, going straight to the battery would be good, but it's a lot of wire to run, and it's not free. Like in the front, a disconnect was hung just behind the bumper, just in reach of the winch leads.

Now was the cool part, a combination of needs that works out great. I thought as long as there were these nice accessible power points, why not use these for jumping instead of opening up the hood and fiddling around with clamps on my batteries? So I took a good set of long heavy cables (these are not your auto-store specialties either, heavy #2 stranded welding cable), and cut one end off, replacing it with a disconnect (making SURE to get the polarities right!). Now at the same time, I needed to come up with a way to get power from under the rear bumper back to the trailer bed (about 6 feet) for when the winch gets used on it. So I cut the other end of the jumper cables off about 1' from the clamps, and put a disconnect on both the long cable and the short piece with the clamps. Now the clamps can be left attached for jumping, or pull them off and it's an extension cord for the winch. Perfect!

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