Photos needed. Shed full of S**t Auction

[Tony Wheeler]

Originally Posted by Tony Smith

If it pivots about the chassis rail, then the drive gear could be withdrawn from the Low Ratio position and re-inserted in the High ratio position.

That would be one solution Tony, another one would be to make the post itself removable, and have two separate locating positions on the chassis rail, eg. short piece of box section for it to slide into, with a simple locking pin.

Either way though it would explain the redesign from the early version where the post appears to be fixed vertically on the bumper bar, or at best, hinged at the base with a locking pin hole in the brace plate for high ratio position. Perhaps they found this arrangement was not robust enough in high ratio, which being only 4:1 would require considerable force on the crank handle. And of course if it was indeed fixed vertically, then they would quickly discover in trials that 16:1 was impractical in most situations, and certainly impractical for winding in loose cable.

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Either way I think you're onto something Tony because if you look at the 9th Div jeep winch you'll notice the drive gear is at least half way out, which indicates they haven't pushed it back in far enough for the Dawn locking pin to engage:

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This is something I do myself routinely on my Dawn No. 5 winch, purely through laziness when changing ratios. It's not necessary to engage the locking pin, but of course when I go for a spin around the backyard the handle sometimes falls out, and next time I need to use the winch I have to search for it in the long grass! In the case of the jeep that can't happen, and since you'd be changing ratios repeatedly you wouldn't bother with the Dawn locking pin each time, it would just be an unnecessary nuisance.

Whatever the case in practice though, the fact that the drive gear is so far out in this photo tells us the entire shaft is removable, which can only be for the purpose of changing ratios. That would make this winch infinitely more practical.

I suspect the shaft attachment only looks complex because they've retained the Dawn handle mounting parts, it's possibly just a piece of box section or channel enclosing them and welded to the long shaft. However I'm not sure why they'd retain those parts, rather than simply join the two shafts with a welded sleeve. Perhaps they wanted to maintain the integrity of the Dawn handle mount for interchangeability purposes, esp. for the first batch which must be considered a trial mod only. Given that these winches were used elsewhere in standard form it would make sense not to ruin them for those applications, at least not until the jeep mod was fully proven in the field. Even then it would still make sense not to ruin them if possible.

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