Do you need a winch? If you are reading this we think you do! A 4WD winch is one of the greatest mods for getting your 4×4 further offroad. With one push of a button you can drag your vehicle out of sticky or sketchy situations, you’d otherwise struggle to recover from and get all four tyres back on terra firma!

With many different winches on the market, it’s hard to know which one is best suited for your vehicle, a massive 7.2HP motor, included synthetic rope and pintle hook Adventure Kings Domin8r X Winch absolutely domin8s the competition for features, and has an unbeatable price!

The phrase ‘DIY installation’ is that excites some and makes others nervous, in this article we’ll go over just how easily you can Do It Yourself trouble free in the garage or shed.

To start off with it is a good idea to check if your vehicle is capable of carrying a 12,000lb winch.Tthere are a few options for mounting a winch to your vehicle. There are winch cradles designed to fit to a tow hitch receiver, these are a temporary and less secure method of mounting than to a bulbar.

If you are planning on fitting a winch to your bullbar (which is by far the most common way) it’s important to find out what size winch your bar is compatible to carry. Typically, most winch compatible steel bulbar with a 254mm X 114.3mm (10”x4.5”) bolt pattern are suitable but check with your manufacturer to be sure, an incompatible bar can end up causing damage to your vehicle or bystanders if there is a failure.

Now you have identified the mounting location, its time to sort out all your parts.

What you should have included in the box;

1x pre-assembled winch with 26m of 9.5mm synthetic cable pre-spooled
1x pintle hook with easy to grab fabric tab
1x winch control box with included wiring.
1x winch controller (forward, backwards)
1x mounting hardware kit.

Once you have confirmed these components, its time to start fitting your new winch.

STEP 1 – Installing the winch.

choose and align the correct style of fairlead with the cable hole in your winch bar and check to see if it utilises the mounting holes for the winch or not, different manufacturers will vary their mounting specifications.
Align the mounting holes of your winch to the holes in your winch bar. And fasten with the included bolts.

For the moment get 1 thread 2 bolts to take the weight of the winch, then continue with the remaining hardware. Don’t worry about getting these extremely tight just yet. It’s best to leave a little slack until all the bolts are in place and snug.

Once the winch has been bolted into place, release the clutch of the winch and feed the eye of the winch rope through your fairlead and connect your pintle hook. Reengage the clutch mechanism.

NB: Depending on the mounting location you have chosen it may be necessary to mount your fairlead using the mounting holes for the winch using longer bolts (not included) in other applications you may even need an offset fairlead to prevent abrasion on your rope.

STEP 2 – This is the easy part. It’s time to run your wiring. Your winch control box has 5 heavy gauge wires coming out of it.

The 3 wires that go to your winch are colour-coded and extremely simple to locate, all you have to do is loosen the nuts off the colour-coded winch terminals and fasten the crimped connectors with the nuts and lock washers making sure you place them in the correct order.
Once these cables are fastened, we recommend cable tying the loose cables together to make them neat and tidy and keep them out of the way to avoid any hang-ups later.

There are 2 more cables that come from your winch control box – one is positive (RED) and the other is negative (black). These two cables are best connected directly to your crank battery, even if you have a whole battery bank.

When a winch is in operation, it will pull stacks of power in a short period of time, so we recommend upgrading (if you have the space) to a 650CCA battery to cope with the high current draw of a winch under load.

NB: Never use your winch with your motor off. Your alternator will give a good chunk of the current your winch needs without depleting your battery too much, and it can’t do that if the car isn’t running.

STEP 3 – Now that your winch has been mounted, and your wiring has been run,You can install the control box to a convenient location on your bullbar. Depending on your battery’s location this may be dead in the middle of your bar, or to either side; this depends on your vehicle.

STEP 4 – Now that everything has been fastened and wired up, it is a good idea to go over every nut and bolt to make sure everything is secured and fastened to the torques specified in the manual and the wiring is not loose or able to short out on any metal components.

STEP 5 –

Testing!

This is the fun bit, reach down to your winch gearbox and deactivate the clutch, this will allow the cable to free spool out – pull your cable out a short amount (1-2m) and connect your controller to the control box.

Retract the winch by pressing the ‘IN’ button, it should spool steadily, and smoothly back in. now try feeding the winch out, it should slowly unspool rope at the same speed.

Now you can hit the tracks with confidence, and comfort knowing you have a reliable and feature packed winch to get you out of trouble when you need it most.