Any opinions on Terrafirma winches?

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headintheclouds

Well-Known Member
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Location
Bucks
I have had a good look on the forum but can't find anything useful.
I would like a winch for self recovery once in a blue moon. Not worried about how fast it works as long as it gets me unstuck. Needs to be able to unstick a fully laden 110. Deep mud / sand / ditches. Not dragging it up the front of a dam.

The Terrafirma spec looks as though it should be ok for occasional use and at about £600 new including bumper it looks worth investigating. Anyone have any constructive thoughts?
 
Dragging a fully laden 110 up a dam is probably easier than getting it unstick from Deep mud / sand / ditches..... A 12000lb winch is 5444kg. it's 'maximum' pull strength and thats only when there is 1 layer of rope on the drum. 4 layers of rope and the pull is down to around 4000kg
Pulling it's maximum load the winch will draw around 400Amps. Check you battery can handle that sort of load and fit cable that can cope with more Amps than that.

My rule of thumb is to (roughly) calculate the load on the winch and to use anchor points to spread that load rather than concentrate it all to one point. Pulling yourself up in the air is easy, fully laden you'll not be over 3500kg, drag a cube of wet mud/sand with you and you'll be over 4000kgs.

Add:
I've just read the description and specs etc. I see it " comes with a cool black alloy hawse fairlead, is finished in stealthy matt black with matching compact solenoid pack and has a wireless remote" I wonder if it has 8 aerials too (?) that would be really cool and stealthy, just the sort of properties you need in a winch :D
 
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Just to throw a spanner in the works, I love my huskey. worm drive, very slow and easy to control, and no overheating drum brake to worry about. Possibly similar to OP I do not have a real need for a winch, and have only used it a couple of times for self recovery. it more often gets used for pulling things on and off the trailer, and that is only because i am too lazy to use the manual winch!

I also second the comments above regarding cable capacity etc. it cost me more to get the cabling, solenoids, and isolator than it did to get the winch and bumper (second hand). It may be overkill but I made my own cable up using 70mm welding wire which should be good for about 500 amps.
 
The above stuff about cable got me thinking and I did a few fag packet calculations.
35mm cable weighs about 350g per meter. 400A through this cable gives a voltage drop of 0.5V - not much, we think.
0.5V at 400A is 200W or 200 joules per second. Specific heat capacity of copper is about .39
Ignoring any cooling effect 50 degree C rise takes about 34 seconds. 100 degree rise just over a minute.
70mm cable not only has half the resistance, but twice the mass so the winch could run for 4 times as long for the same heating effect as 35mm
In reality there will be a reasonable amount of cooling - proportionally more as cable gets hotter - but it's still far more heat build-up than I would have guessed.
If anyone out there smells bull exhaust solids and questions my physics I will be pleased to be corrected. It's a long time since I was in the classroom.

Unless corrected my conclusion is that 35mm is very much on the light side and I will be using 70mm.
 
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