On May 25, 1:44 am, Derek Copeland wrote:
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I am rather curious to know why this particular winch is so highly geared?
This probably justified your decision to launch in second gear. With a more
sensible axle ratio, automatic gear changes during the full climb in
'drive' would have been avoided. Our experience in the UK suggests that
automatic gearbox up changes during the ground run do not cause any
problems.

You cannot succesfully repair winch cables by tieing knots. The same is
also true for aerotow ropes. Synthetic cables and ropes have to be
spliced, and steel cables have to be spliced or crimped with brass
ferrules. We tried out synthetic cable at our club, but went back to steel
cables, partly for reasons of cost, but also because it seemed to take an
age to splice broken cables back together. As Frank rightly points out
below, having the right tools for the job and a bit of training in how to
do it for the winch drivers would have speeded things up a lot.

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I suspect many 'Gehrlein' type designs used the differential that came
with the vehicle the supplied the original engine and automatic
transmission. Typically, final drives were in the 2.7X-2.9X range.
My F150 is a 4WD Off-Road with a final drive of 3.73, which also
increases the towing capacity, but it also has a tall overdrive gear
(4th) and locking torque converter. These final drives became more
common after 1990 when locking torque converters, electronic shifting,
and overdrive automatics became standard. Higher ratios of the
'muscle car' ;and 'hot rod' types were commonly matched with 4-speed
manual transmissions from the 1950's through the 1970's. Refitting
cost a few hundred dollars, time and effort, so it wasn't done.

The Amsteel II in use takes a bit longer to splice with the covering.
Uncovered 12-strand can be spliced almost a quickly as steel swaging
with a good fid and a little practice. I'm not talking about the
Class II tuck splice on the Samson site, which involves tapering and
stitching, but a simple 3x3 or 4x4 tuck splice.

Frank