Santa came and gave me/the Cruiser a winch for christmas!
It took some time, but it's installed and good to go! It seemed nothing went smoothly - not that hard of a procedure, pull off the bumper, install winch, put it back on, but there were some hiccups.
Here's a shot pre-winch (from a year or so ago)
The winch I chose was the M8000, the bumper is designed to hold the 9.5xp, the 8000 isn't as strong, but it's half the price. With some massaging the 8000 will fit....the main issue is installing the control box.
1st off, the angle bracket (that used to be shipped with the winch) was not there - I knew it wouldn't be there, but didn't think about it in advance, the bumper was off, I was at my Dad's house, and it had to be installed...so we Improvised and came up with this:
The difficult part regarding the control box is that the All-Pro mounting hole is 90 degrees the wrong direction and too narrow for the M8000, I've seen where guys have drilled the rivets and let the plug dangle...but was unhappy with this location and figured that it would be nearly impossible to plug in the remote if I was stuck in some nasty stuff.
We decided to extend the remote plug, we figured that a surface mount on the bumper would allow for the easiest access - with some wire casing & a gromet it almost looks stock!
Here's a backdoor shot of the bumper plus winch & control box:
After a quick test fit I notice the new placement of the control box was contacting a mount on the truck - so she lost a little bit of skin.
I don't have any good pics of it installed - it got dark on me tonight but here are a few cell phone night pics, I'll try and get some more posted up tomorrow.
Front shot:
Angle shot -
Side shot - note remote location under turn signal & new battering ram/roller fairlead.
So there you have it! Let me know what you think!
Mtbcoach
Project Crawler
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