Looking for advice on building low cost. powerful winch (electric or hydraulic).

[ThorsHammer]

I take it the grade is steep enough that gravity and rollers allow you to put it back in the water?

[DockMan30817]

I also build dock and the lake im on averages10' up and down always moving docks I just bought a 12000lbs badlands winch from harbor freight and It does the job I caught it on sale for 335 bucks

[Northeaster]

Update-
- Welded brackets with wheel hubs and braces onto the steel dock corners, and added 8 spare / doughnut tires to the docks. Yes, there is enough grade that they just rolled in, with a push here and there to go over a rock or two. Didn't even wait for high tide.

- next, found a used 1978 20,000lb pto army truck winch at a local salvage yard for next to nothing. Did not work properly as the handle was broken off of the lever to disengage / engage the drum. Father-in-law and I took it all apart. Needs 1 seal, but otherwise there is very little wear on the gears, or any parts for that matter.
The guy at the salvage yard had used it for a while to drag cars around the yard. He had removed the pto adapter and welded / mounted a flywheel to a collar on the worm gear shaft. He then mounted a car starter so that it would engage on the flywheel. He said it had lots of power like that. The starter is shot now.
We are just deciding to replace the starter with a good used one to try it, or maybe to set up a belt / pulley or maybe chain / gears.
We would like to be able to change it so that it could pull lighter loads like logs (faster pull) when mounted on the tractor / backhoe but also be able to change gears / pulleys so that it pulls heavy loads with much more force and slower speed, like my boat docks and eventually 10,000lb boat ( on a homemade rail system).
By the way, backhoe is not located near boat and docks, or I would have used that to pull!

[CarterKraft]

a 5-9hp gas engine with a torq a verter would pretty slick for that I imagine.

[Northeaster]

What kind of torque converter do you mean? Is there a brand or model you can recommend?
I am only somewhat familiar with torque converters on cars / trucks. not sure what typical specs they have.

[Farmerboy]

I have made winches out of old irrigation gear boxes that were on center pivot sprinklers,
I have made three of them and with hydraulic motors they will pull a 1/2 cable in to,
I needed two of them to set up this tower, and powered with electric drills so I could keep a feel for the load and if any thing got hung up instantly, I could tell it, Even the price of the boxes are not that bad new, http://www.zimmaticparts.com/

I like the old Lockwood boxes as they have a shaft that extends past the plate the wheel is bolted to, and all one needs is a section of pipe, (I used a section of bushing stock to join two main shafts together and then a support on the tail end, (the top winch using a bushing , and the bottom I had a so so bearing that I used.(many of these gear boxes are discarded as they wear the input shaft and leak oil, normally a few bearings and some times build up the shaft and turn it back down and your in business.

my son has his on hydraulic and has it mounted on the bed of his truck and uses it with Jin poles, he has pulled a 1/2 cable in to, I had the same one mounted on a truck at one time, and it was PTO driven and messed up and pulled a 1/2 inch csble in to as well, so the box is solid,

there 50 to 1 and some are 52 to 1 or that is my experience, they normally have a center drive gear box, that is powered with a 1 or 1.5 hp motor,
and my guess is the center is 30 to 1 to 50 to 1 again, and that then drive the wheel boxes on the pivots,

[robphillips00]

If you are going DC look at Smitty Built. They make a nice winch for the price.

[Northeaster]

Farmer - very cool! So those gears are 50:1 or so reduction, correct? I woudl look into something like taht. but already have the winch now. Do you think those gears could be used to turn the worm gear of winch (reads below) thus reducing the amount of power needed (but of course increasing the number of turns)?

We have not had time to put the old army winch back together yet - don't really need it till the fall. I am curious as to it's reduction ratio. It is a pto winch, and the pto attached to a shaft with a worm gear on it,(outside diameter of worm gear likely about 3" or so). The worm gear drives a large gear that is on the drum shaft (diameter of that gear likely 6-7" or so - don't have it here in front of me. Once we have it back together, we want to figure out the ratios, so we know roughly what size pulleys / gears to put on it, and also decide to run it with a DC starter motor, or after seeing your post, maybe an electric drill, just to try it.
I assume that the worm gear to drum gear would not have reduced it down too much, as the pto would have had lots of power. As I may want to power it with a less powerful source (starter or drill) we plan on mounting a large gear (maybe flywheel) with many teeth on the worm gear shaft (where the pto would have been connected) and then run a starter on that, or maybe a drill on a small gear with a small number of teeth, to turn the larger gear.

Rob - Already have the winch, so now juts trying to determine best "backyard" power source to turn the pto shaft / worm gear. Prefer DC starter or similar, but if gearing could be set up right to be powered by a dewalt 18V drill or driver, that would be interesting.

Open to further ideas! Thanks for help and ideas so far.

[Farmerboy]

these two sites give one some info on figureing ratios of the gears them self,

http://www.salemcompany.com/cgi-bin/...arsClsect4.pdf
http://www.technologystudent.com/gears1/worm1.htm