Which Winch??

I would go with eletcric, proberly 9500lb.

For any reason you stall your motor, and cannot re-start you can still winch on the battery and it may just be enough to get you out. With another vehicle you can use their battery and continue winching when yours goes flat. As long as one vehicle is running, the other can be re-started.

If you have dual battries you can use the winch for a short time without starting the vehicle, handy when pulling a steer up into a tree to skin etc.

Hero if your truck can take a PTO winch I would fit one. Most of the winch recoverys I have been involved with in the Vic High Country have resulted in almost stuffed Warn winches as the amount of work is too much for them unless you want to spend 2 days getting out(waiting for the winch to cool etc). As for winching without the motor running you will have flat batteries in 15 minutes. Victoria Police/Victoria SES try as hard as they can to fit Thomas PTO winches wherever they can and have had arguments with Toyota over it.

This is my opinon only and I await the replies with interest.

Darryn

I paid $1290 for my Brawn 9500lb winch. It works well. Have had three Warn winches before and they were good as well. Also had two Toyota PTO winches and although they are very strong winches and superior over electric winches I did not like them as they are difficult to operate if you are on your own.
Cheers,Willem

Always going somewhere

Buy second hand, I did, got my 10,000lb warn used half dozen times for $1200. I could sell it tomorrow for $1200 too I reckon.

As Willem said, look at Colin from Brawns winches, they are VERY good, and cheap. Honestly, had mine 9-12 mths, used it first day out and 2 others, then my stupidity, should have pulled apart and serviced it a few times. They cant just sit there for years unused on the front.. Water gets in and they go fubar.

Dont buy new!

Hydro needs the engine running,so if in water or something like that, it may as well be a used condom.
PTO, also needs engine running so if in water or something like that, it may as well be a used condom.
Elect, using lots kills the battery, so need at least 2.

I have had several Warn electric wincheson several vehicles over the past 20 years and this time I put the TJM OX hydraulic winch on my F250. The cable retrieval rate on the OX is much slower than the electrics, but it does have a fast no load retrieve. I found that it takes a little while to get used to how to position the controls when it is in use, otherwise they both work very good. If you are only fitting the winch for the ocassional time that you might need it then I would go for the electric as anyone can transfer it to another vehicle. With the OX it is a much bigger job to fit and swap to another vehicle.
Brian

You can by an X9 Superwinch for about 1300bucks and fit it yourself (9000lb)...It got rated with 3 stars in a recent test in 4x4 mag which was the same as the Warn...._____________________________________________

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I've got an OX Hydraulic and have been very, very happy with it.

Premier 9000lb kicks on, god price well made and fitted by brown davies

good jobLaterally Literal
Seriously Cerebral

I wanted a warn 9500 but it would not fit an ARB bar on the LC100, so I upgraded to the 10,000, and was very glad to have done so have recently pushed it to the limit.

I love the 38 meter 9.5 line (versus 30 metre at 8.0) very useful when anchor points are far away and you've run out of extension straps

The bigger drum (approx 50%) means you have a much stronger force through the layers (less drop off with each layer), especially when you consider the first layer starts half full!

Yes you can use a snatch to increase force times 2 but you loose line length.

Now fitting a second battery to support the massive current draw, and thinking a 12000 might have been a better choice