Dump Trailer Winch Mount Fabrication

For several years now I've been using a Come-Along to drag old relics of tractors into my dump trailer. It gets old real fast, so I decided a couple of months ago that I need a winch. The one big downside of buying a winch is the task of fabricating a mounting location on the trailer for the winch. My first attempt was less than stellar. I thought I could weld a 1/4" steel plate to the top rail and bolt the winch to the plate. Sounds easy enough, so that's what I did.

I thought all was good in the world, so I bolted the winch to the plate, pulled 12' of cable out of the winch, and fastened the hook to the back end of the trailer to do a stress test on the mount. The winch had a lot of oomph but the top rail of the trailer...... not so much. It bent. I did some brainstorming with the wifely unit to try and stiffen the top rail but in the end I figured I should just bite the bullet and do it right. By the way, after I bent the top rail, I used a Come-Along hooked to the top rail and a tractor to straighten the rail as much as I could. It's still bent but it is better. Maybe the next time I have the Kubota in the trailer, I'll try to bend it straighter.

My solution to the problem was to weld a 2" receiver hitch stub into the front bottom of the trailer so I could then mount the winch to a trailer ball mount. That way I can easily remove and install the winch. I purchased a receiver hitch stub from Amazon and was going to use a ball mount I'd given to my daughter but she wasn't using it. Problem is, I forgot to pick it up when I was there last, so I rummaged around my steel stash and found a 12" long piece of 2" angle iron. I cut it into two 6" pieces so I could weld them together to make a 2" square tube. The only problem is, I had to remove 1/4" from each side of one piece so the end product would be a 2" square. If I'd just welded the two pieces together without cutting one of them, the square would be about 2-1/4" square. That endeavor took a couple of hours.

I then cut a piece of 1/4" plate that could be welded to the square tube and used as a winch mount. These next two photos below shows the final product.

I then had to cut 2" square holes in the bed and bracing of the trailer. The vertical brace is shown below, with the receiver stub welded in.

I welded the stub to the bottom of the trailer bed also, and up the sides and across the top, where the stub pokes out of the bed. I don't think it's going anywhere.

One final thing I had to do was install clamps onto the winch wiring so I could easily clip the winch leads to the dump trailer's hydraulic pump battery. The wires came with terminal ends but I wanted to be able to hook and unhook the wires without tools. I found some clamps in the basement and soldered them to the winch wires.