The ones they sale at HF now ( at leaset the one I just bought ) comes with a 16mm hex stud stick up off the worm gear. The handles now have a 16mm socket welded to them. LOL they liked your idea and ran with it. The mod i like to see is one were you can pivot the worm gear away from the bigger gear so you can free spool the cable out. At 41 cranks of the handle to get a full rotation of the drum that is a lot of cranking. My cable takes 45 turns of the drum to come completely in. That is 1845 cranks LOL.
Nice, but mounted backwards on trailer… The drum should be facing the load… So the cable does not run through the winch and ride it against the spreader bolt
Bear with me here, I'm not up to snuff on what this modification is. You said a sleeve...what size? is the sleeve a fitting for a socket wrench? I don't know what I'm seeing. I just installed my winch and it does indeed take forever to crank. A little more info on what you did here would help.
The "sleeve" is a spacer. I imagine it keeps that nut from moving down when you are using the winch to pull. Then on the original handle looks like he welded a long socket the size of the nut incase he doesn't have the drill around.
Yes, these worm-drive winches are also LIFTING winches, so they raise/lower weights. And when you stop, worm-drive winches are by design natural "brake winches" as the load stops at whatever position it's at when you stop winching. Nice. -- BR
Worm-drive winches (I have a Dutton-Lainson myself) are "self-braking" winches, meaning, it does not "free-spool" as you have to crank the handle to reel the line in or, crank the handle the opposite way to reel it out. So yeah, it does "hold tension" and you can stop it at any point (safely) even if you're lifting something. -- BR
