Im lookin forward to seein it finished
We had another shop session yesterday (8+ hours!) and managed to get my brothers lift installed on the Rubicon, and about 90% of the work completed for the winch install. We ran into a snag with the troubleshooting last night after everything was installed and decided to wait for the next session to finish it, as he had to get up and go to work in 8 hours lol.
The fitting of the plate to my bumper was super easy, as I had already trimmed my bumper and by pure luck the top of the fairlead fit flush against the trimmed bottom of my bumper. We got the new holes drilled in the plate for mounting to the frame (missed one by a quarter inch and spent some time hogging out the hole to make it work).
Next came the wiring. I wanted a divorced solenoid box located higher up in the engine bay, away from all but the deepest water during crossings. We decided to mount the box in the little space between the battery and the headlight. We looked at the cable lengths coming from the solenoid box and determined that the black and yellow (its black but has a yellow insulating boot on it) cables needed to be lengthened to 6 ft in length. A quick trip to the auto parts store for two cables and 4 new ends got us what we needed. The rewire was fairly straight forward (remains to be seen if I did it correctly lol) and we started work on the mounting bracket for its new home in front of the battery.
We took the existing bracket that comes mounted to the back of the solenoid box and hammered it flat for easier reshaping. We decided to weld it to the battery tie down bar so the box would be secure but easily removable if a headlight needed to be changed. We then bent to it fit the tie down bar and made our welds. A note here: both pieces of metal are pretty questionable metallurgy, so should you go this route- burn it in slow and cold. We blew a little hole in the tie down bar getting the heat right.
Once the boogers were ground off and the bracket was painted, the bracket was reinstalled on the back of the box. A little RTV was added to the lid to seal up the box nicely, and the box was mounted in its new home under the hood.
We were extremely happy with how sanitary the install looks, and the box fits in there next to the Optima battery perfectly.
Unfortunately the testing didn't go too well and something was amiss. Neither the winch or the solenoid box responded to the input from the handheld controller... DOH!
We were out of time so we remounted the bumper and buttoned things up for the night.
I'm going to install my wireless winch controller and see if its the handheld unit that's the problem. From there I'll just break out the multimeter and trace the current upstream to find out what went wrong.
Pictures coming later today, and I'll update you with what I find went wrong. Probably a boneheaded mistake on my part somewhere along the line lol.