Capstan winch (Winch woes)

[armandnel]

How about we bring these bad boys back!
Redesigned of course...
72107

Now before you feel the urge to give me the winch 101 tutorial...I'm not a newbie at this.

Here is my main gripe. It seems that as prepared as I try to be, quite often when it's recovery "crunch time" the flaming rope spools and binds and you end up having to do the recovery again...and again because of the poor spooling characteristics of default winch designs. Not to mention cable coming off spool and seized rollers among other.

Can someone please redesign the old Capstan winch or would I be the only buyer out there?

[Phil HH]

It seems that drum type recovery winches could use an automatic cable guide, such as are used on large winches in other applications. The guide runs back and forth and lays the cable correctly on the drum. The catch is that if the pull is not straight, then the guide must be beefy enough to withstand the sideways pull, which can be considerable. This seems to be one of those cases where the solution becomes unnecessarily complex, and the ultimate answer is to just cope with the original problem.


With regard to the capstan winch, I had one of those illustrated on my old Series 2a and it was most useful. It had buckets of grunt, and was used to get myself and others out of trouble quite a few times.

[101RRS]

Can someone please redesign the old Capstan winch or would I be the only buyer out there?

There are plenty of capstan winches out there that for all intents and purposes work the same as drum winches. An example is the standard Nokken winch on the 101.

Garry

[Dorian]

The following is a Utube of the "Intelligent "winch which lays the rope on the drum and get around the pull direction, quite clever but there's a lot of guff hanging off the front of the vehicle.

The Intelligent Winch - 4X4 - YouTube

Electric Capstan winches are used on Yachts for sail trimming, however the largest loading I could find was about 500kg and they come in at around $2K

[Bigbjorn]

At Leyland Truck and Bus we used to fit PTO drum winches (Thomas) and LR's capstan winch. Anyone that ever had a capstan winch would want one on their next Land Rover. The standard LR winch was rated to give a pull of 2500 lbs. with 3-4 turns of rope on the capstan. Larger versions were available.

For those winch freaks amongst us, Truck and Bus refused to supply or fit electric winches. These were left up to a dealer to fit if required.

[isuzutoo-eh]

I don't get why winch drums are so wide when they could be narrow but deep, like Hall's Hickey: http://www.aulro.com/afvb/general-chat/177676-hickey-winch.html
I realise you can get a stronger pull from a smaller working diameter, but that just means different motors, gearing or method of powering (ie PTO or hydraulic) might be needed.

[Sitec]

Capstan winches are fantastic! When I first got roped into the world of the AWDC in the UK in the 80's, the guy I trialed with ran a Series 3 with one and it was a simple piece of kit that always worked. He did know what he was doing with it too, which helps! If I was planning to run a front mounted winch on a Series this is the way I'd go. The reasons I'm going to run hydraulic under the rear of the 101 is, I have a PTO+ pump, I want a decent drum with a decent length of cable, and I want the thing to be able to keep going (another + point of a Capstan)! Rear floor access also does not suit a Capstan without a lot of cutting and modifying which I want to avoid. :)