Traveller 12,000 Pound Winch Repair

A guy in the tractor club had his trailer's 12,000 pound winch quit working. He decided to just get a new one rather than try and fix this one, as it has been acting up for years. I asked if I could try and fix it. He had no objections. This photo is the finished product, and the winch works once again.

I didn't know what the winch's problem was (ended up being several) but by the time I got it, the winch had been disassembled quite a bit and the winch cable was also removed. In the below photo, the blue wire's terminal end had been cut off, so I crimped on a new terminal (red thing) and reattached the wire. The winch worked again so I reinstalled the plastic cover over the wires. It couldn't be that easy, could it? Nope. The joy was short-lived, as the winch acted up.

The main issue seemed to be that there were several things wrong with the winch, not just one. The next issue I found was with the control switch wire bundle cable. It has a four-pin connector that mates to a counterpart on the winch, and the slip-fit pins were making intermittent contact depending on how the connector was being held. I was able to spread out each of the four pins and that helped, so I started rewinding the 1/2" diameter winch cable onto the drum (not an easy feat). Once again, the joy was short-lived. The winch started acting up again.

At that point I took the control switch cable to the bench and started checking resistance between the various wires. There are three wires in the cable: power, drum forward, and drum reverse. The blue wire below is the main power wire and I happened to find an intermittent break in it about 8" from the switch. The wire in the photo has a break in the copper wire about in the middle of its length but the insulation is not damaged at all. It's pretty bizarre. And it's very fortunate the break wasn't somewhere other than near the switch, as that would have meant a lot more work for me to replace the whole control switch cable.

The two stubby pieces of wire in the middle of the photo below were not cut apart from each other. The one piece just pulled out of the other's insulation (after I cut through just the insulation). This was the main culprit causing all the grief.

I took the control cable and switch to the basement and soldered the shortened wires back onto the switch.

Here's the first photo again (below), you know, just in case you forgot what the winch looked like. It didn't come with the four bolts and nuts that attach it to the receiver hitch base plate so I bought some 7/16" Grade 8 fasteners. Problem was, the one hole I measured to get the bolt size was larger than the other three holes and the bolts didn't fit the three holes. Not to mention the 7/16" nuts didn't fit into the casting slots where they should fit. I'm guessing I should have gotten metric bolts and nuts (probably 12mm). I ended up digging through BOB (bucket-o-bolts) and found four 3/8" Grade 5 bolts to use. Once the winch was mounted, I reinstalled the fairlead (roller thingamabobber) that had been removed.

You may not have noticed in the photo above but the word "Traveller" is upside down (it had been painted at one point and reinstalled upside down). I'd mounted the winch so the word was right side up when looking at the winch from this direction but then I found out that the IN and OUT on the control switch was backwards. Off came the winch from the base to flip it around. Not an easy task working in such tight quarters with my thick fingers.

The next issue was that I couldn't get the winch cable through the anchor hole in the winch drum until I took the fairlead back off, also not an easy task, given the tight quarters. I was glad when everything was back together and working. It took way longer than it should have.