Great thread. I have been thinking about which winch to get for my FJ60. After reading this today I did a CL search and came up with a used Warn M12000 for $350 close to me. Going to check it out tomorrow, hopefully I come up with something as nice as yours in the end.
It may be a great deal. Winches can take a good amount of abuse, and the design is pretty simple, so rebuilding is straight forward. However, it can get costly, depending on what you need to replace. gaskets, fresh grease, new powder coat, are easy. Things start to get costly if you need to buy new planetary gears, gear housing, a new drum, etc. You should give any used winch a once over and do a few tests to make sure that the major pieces are in good working order.
Before I purchased mine, I made sure that the motor worked both in and out, and I could free spool the drum. I checked as best I could that the drum wasn't bent. I also listened to the internals. It was noisy, but no grinding or really nasty sounds from what I could hear. My assessment was that it just had some moderate to severe external corrosion, and the grease was old.
Of course you never know until you take it apart. I had my fingers crossed that the internals were not damaged or rusted out. In that regard I was right. I had just a little bit of pitting on the internal metal components. It cleaned up really well.
On my rebuild project, my biggest cost may be with the brake. If I can't get the old one back in and working properly, I'll have to fork up a few hundred bucks for a new one.
