[TowerTalk] HF Winch

[David Gilbert]

About five years ago I bought an inexpensive Harbor Freight hand-crank 
worm gear winch for use in a simple homebrew mast raising fixture.  The 
mast plus antenna weighed less than 250 pounds and the winch was rated 
at 2,000 pounds.   It sounded fine on paper but almost created a 
disaster.  The worm gear was hard steel but the toothed gear was 
apparently made from mild steel because after only a few feet of lifting 
I could tell that teeth were being ground away.  I literally had to 
apply fresh lithium grease to the teeth every revolution of the toothed 
gear and after about 10 feet of lifting there was less than 50% of the 
metal left on each tooth.

I also once bought a Harbor Freight crowbar ... the beefy kind (maybe 
5/8 inch diameter) that you normally use for pulling large nails.  I was 
using it to pry something apart and I literally put a large permanent 
bend in it just with my own arm strength.

There is no way I would trust anything of value to Harbor Freight steel, 
and in the case of NF4L's tiltover tower there are so many things that 
are far beyond good engineering guardbands (the probability of bad 
steel, the >REAL< winch rating versus the load, the ridiculously 
undersized motor as revealed by the duty cycle rating, the lack of a 
brake, etc) that if he hadn't decided on his own not to use that HF 
winch we should have staged some kind of intervention or something.

73,
Dave   AB7E



On 2/3/2014 10:57 AM, Les Listwa wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just want to share my experience with a " cheap"  2500lb Electric Winch.
> Tried to use one ( actually even tried a second one)  to lift a Hazer type
> device up 40 feet of 45G.  My load was about 300 lbs total.  What I found,
> is that before I had a chance to even try to lock the Hazer device in
> place, the winch would begin to creep down, once I took my finger off the
> up button.  A winch is not designed to lift.
>
>   Also, 2500lb of torque  is a powerful beast and I learned that if
> something goes wrong,  in a split second that 2500lbs of torque can rip
> apart cables and aluminum, before you even realize there is a problem,
> because there is no feedback. I learned that the hard way.
>
> Based on the advice of  John, W2GD, Antenna and Tower Installer
> extraordinaire, I switched to a Fulton K1550 manual winch and had a local
> welder make  a custom mount for the tower. I have complete control and can
> stop it on a dime.  My recommend is to go with a Fulton Manual Winch.
>
> By the way, to power my electric winch, I used a Sear car 12V battery
> boosters (500 peak amps/400 cranking amp) , just left it trickle charging
> until I wanted to raise or lower the antenna.
>
> 73
> Les
> W2LPL
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