Winch mounted without winch bar! GU Patrol

Well I have got it mounted! I posted some time back asking about whether it could be done without a winch bar and thanks to some responses I have made it happen. ( For an accountant I am pretty chuffed with the results.....had some help from some talented family I must admit and I thank them). Thanks to all who gave advice, I particularly had the courage to proceed due to Robins posting of is similar experience.

In my Rig Gallery I have posted 7 pics of the build up for anyone who is interested.
The install was done without altering any of the existing structure.

Unlike Robin's install, my radiator and fan set-up did not allow mounting on a flat bar and I was forced to drop everything about 5cm. I also didn't have any points below to mount off of.

I decided to go heavier steel to compensate. It is all 150mm wide. The bottom plate is 10mm thick (I wanted to use 8mm but the steel merchant didn't have any and gave me 10mm for the same price.....what's a bit of extra weight?).

I couldn't run flush down the side of the chassis rails because the bumper mountings protrude. Angle iron is stonger than welding and I wanted to bolt the base rather than weld to give a bit of allowance for flex etc.

In the end got 4 pieces of 6mm x 150 long angle and welded them into two "Z's". The 10mm plate sits between them and there is an upright 6mm plate welded to the front with a cutout for the fairlead.

All pretty easy in the end (lots of trial and error in the middle....including a few welds that had to be broken) but I think it has worked out ok. The hardest bit has been to relocate the number plate!

Still have to mount the electronics side of it all in the engine bay (need some longer cables etc) (plus find somewhere to mount it).

Hope this helps anyone else contemplating it.

Happy new year
Trev