Offroad-Express

Today I accidentally over-ran my Ridge Ryder 9,500 winch - yeah stupid I know. I wasn't paying enough attention and pulled the cable up so tight on the spool that everything is now locked up so I cannot physically move the engage/disengage lever. Pressing the "out" button on the remote switch just results in a "click", without it unwinding. Has anyone else had this experience and if so what will fix it? Until I did this, the winch has been working great on my Samurai.

Unbolt it off the mountings to relieve the load on the winch gearbox

Those winches don't like backing off under load - The brake mechanism is hopeless, and if you keep trying to reverse the winch - it'll shear the three 4mm pins in the drive/brake mechanism and then you'll have nothing, since the motor drives through the same 3 pins to the planetary gears... You should also avoid unwinding the rope on the motor - always use the free-spool. Otherwise it still runs against the (very small and puny) brake drum and will strip the lining, leading to failure later.

If you dismantle the winch and see how weak the brake mechanism is - you'll also avoid relying on it for steep uphill winching. They are fine for recovering from bogs & such, and pull surprisingly well, but not to be relied on to hold the weight of the truck on steep slopes with poor traction.

muddy wrote:Those winches don't like backing off under load - The brake mechanism is hopeless, and if you keep trying to reverse the winch - it'll shear the three 4mm pins in the drive/brake mechanism and then you'll have nothing, since the motor drives through the same 3 pins to the planetary gears... You should also avoid unwinding the rope on the motor - always use the free-spool. Otherwise it still runs against the (very small and puny) brake drum and will strip the lining, leading to failure later.

If you dismantle the winch and see how weak the brake mechanism is - you'll also avoid relying on it for steep uphill winching. They are fine for recovering from bogs & such, and pull surprisingly well, but not to be relied on to hold the weight of the truck on steep slopes with poor traction.

The brake in mine is long gone, but with the reduction on the ridge rider winches it still holds simply because of the huge reduction compared to say a 80:1 warn etc of similar capacity. we are talking 180 odd to 1 , they are slow but pull all day long.

Thanks Guys, I unbolted it to relieve the tension and it worked!! It is now back to normal and no damage has been done.