Last July 4th, when most people were barbecuing and drinking beer, I decided to cut down a tree that was dead, and had to come down before we put the split-rail fence around that section of yard. I felled it, but it hung up in an adjacent big tree:
So the idea was to yank it sideways with my newly-installed Smittybilt XRC 9500 winch bought off of Ebay for the lowest price I could find, and drag it up the hill. I had to
surgically chain-saw away the remaining fibers still holding the felled tree to it's stump, an exercise in NOT binding the blade in the shifting tree. Nothing is ever easy.
But success! I was able to do it, and dragged the tree up the hill with the winch until....
I heard a BANG. Winch kept pulling, but I figured I may have sheared a bolt somewhere in the system, and I was right. The bolt that attaches the winch cable to the wall of the winch drum sheared off. If you look closely, you can see it clearly:
A brand-new winch, and NO WAY, under any normal operation, should that bolt be subject to shearing, especially when way less than half the reel was out. There should have been no shearing load on that bolt, and I eyeballed it, and the tensioned cable could not have run over it to apply that shear.
As a side note, the screws that came with the winch to attach the solenoid box to the top rails were cheezy dime-store aluminum, which I replaced with proper steel screws. I have a suspicion that the cable-anchor bolt that sheared was of similar cost-cutting strength.
Just learned thru the ebay seller that Smittybilt is
sending me a new bolt, with the assumption that I dis-mantle the winch myself, remove the remaining shard of bolt in the drum (without damaging the hole, of course, they can assume no liability for user-damage), and re-assemble it.
So of course I'm going to Smittybilt directly and raise holy hell to get a full refund on the winch and send it back to them, but this all could've been avoided if I wasn't such a tightwad...HEY! Guzzi content!
