Excellent application for the winch. I'm not bashing anyone's winch as I'm really not a Winch Snob as some might perceive. I'm simply pragmatic. The BadLands winch can/should work great for those using it within the confines of its engineered design.
Now that the winch has been out for awhile and folks have burned up a bunch of them (OPERATOR ERROR) it has been realized that the 5% duty cycle * is something that is best adhered to and the winch is slowly gaining a better reputation.
SNIP
I wouldn't be dogging the HF too much here for the stated duty cycle. It's not really all that different in practice than with any of the planetary drive winches. My Smittybilt XRC12 gets hot pretty quick, too, and so will just about anything that puts a hot motor on one end and drives it through a quickly warming transmission on the other end, Never used a Warn planetary that was bigger than 6k, but the little one I had on my Trooper got pretty hot pretty fast the few times I used it hard.
I suspect HF is putting that conservative figure out in order to limit the rookie mistakes people do make. It's hard to get in much trouble if you wait 15 minutes after a brief pull and likely helps keep warranty claims under control. But I doubt it's exceptionally different than others with the same design. Most have no or minimal ventilation for either the motor or drive. Put that much juice through under load and the physics tend to dictate quickly rising heat no matter who built your winch.
When using them, I wear heavy gloves and keep touching the parts that will get hot to monitor what's going on because if you sense the heat uncomfortably through the leather it's time to pause. Now that infrared temp reading guns are cheap (yep, you can get one at HF) that might be more precise than the gloved finger. Yes, that could be an issue where speed was important, but speed is also what gets you into trouble with a winch. You're better off in most cases taking things slow and easy. YMMV of course, but speed is what you usually don't want even if your winch is capable.
Just to be clear what I am observing here, it's operator error that kills most winches, including Warn. True, you might expect more mechanical failures from a Smittybilt or HF, but I've not seen much evidence of this being a a problem. Fundamentally, if you expect to do a lot of pulling, you would be better off with an 8274, but parking one on your front bumper on a 80 usually doesn't do your approach angle much good.
And it's fine to spend whatever you can on a winch, but the practical differences vs price are more marginal than is often asserted. Very rarely do you encounter worst case scenarios, but if that's what you like getting into, maybe you should spend those $$. For those that don't, less expensive winches still tend to serve well IMO.
