After install
The winch comes very well packaged with everything colour coded and easy to connect. The winch feels very solid and well built. The instructions are simple and easy to underestand. The winch comes with everything needed to attach it to your bar including nuts, bolts etc. Mine is mounted to a warn winch bar (thanx Chris) wich mounts to the factory tow points on the bumper. The winch is fully sealed to prevent water ingress and looking at it it does appear well sealed. The cables supplied to link up to the battery terminal were long enough to reach the standard battery. The connections have a good solid feel with everything having nice thick wiring for good connections. The only part that I'm a little dissappointed about is the control box as in some pictures in the instruction manual it shows the control box mounted to the winch, however the bracket supplied in no way fits anywhere on the winch. So in the photos the control box is temporarily mounted. So far I have only tested the winch by hand, with no weight it pulls very fast, the remote also works well. All up the install took only three hours including mounting to the winch bar. I found it easiest to mount the winch to the plate and then mount the plate to the factory bar with the winch already on it. The only thing I didn;t do which would have made it easier was to mount the supplied negative terminal wire and earth to the terminal that is under the motor (I should've read the instructions first!). With a bit of fiddling I still managed to connect the wires to the terminal with out unmounting the winch.
So far the winch gets a big tick, however the fun part of testing it in real life is still to come. I will let you know how it goes.
As for prices for anyone wondering the winch was $549 (pickup, from ebay) and the winch plate I picked up second hand for $200. So all up $749 mounted and fitted (I guees I could have charged myself for labour to bring it up to around $1000). And it worked first try, so if I can do it anyone can do it! There arre no special tools or other parts required, a socket set, ring spanners and wrench were all that were used for the install.
Andrew
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