Bulldog Winch Heavy-Duty Series Off-Road Winch - Synthetic Rope - Hawse Fairlead - 18,500 lbs

Video Transcript for Review of Bulldog Winch Electric Winch - Recovery Winch - Truck Winch - BDW44FR

Jeff: Hello everybody, this is Jeff at etrailer.com. Today we're going to take a look at this Bulldog Winch Heavy Duty Series Off-road Winch with the synthetic rope, the Hawse Fairlead and an 18,500 pound weight capacity. Now this heavy duty winch will let you recover a stuck vehicle, helps you move boulders or logs, or pull a large vehicle onto a trailer. So this winch is perfect for firetrucks, ambulances, tow trucks, and other work trucks and commercial vehicles. It is designed for winching vehicles with a maximum gross vehicle weight rating of 12,500 pounds.Now the motor right over here is a 5.6 horsepower series-wound motor, delivers powerful and safe line pulling. This motor is more powerful, more efficient, and produces more torque than a permanent magnet motor.

And they do have drain holes to let water and vapor escape to prevent any internal moisture buildup. This winch does use an automatic ratcheting pawl brake that'll hold a hundred percent of the load. This engaged pawl prevents the drum from spinning in reverse, so a heavy load doesn't unintentionally pay out. Now on top of the motor right up here is a power unit. This will include the contactor, the plastic housing and the electrical wiring.

And you can see the cables that run to your battery are also connected to that.Now we do sell a wiring kit. It's just sold separately on our website that lets you remotely mount this power unit. If you didn't want it on top of the motor, you can mount it somewhere else with the wiring kit. And again, it's sold separately. Now in this power unit is a sealed 500 amp contactor, which will transmit power from the vehicle's battery to the winch motor.

It's water weather resistant to IP67 specifications. If you notice, this does come with this rubber handheld remote with the 12 foot lead. This'll let you operate the winch from a nice safe distance, has a toggle switch for in and out. It's a nice weather resistant switch that'll power the load in and out. And again, to hook it up all you have to do is pop this cap right there, line up the connector, go ahead and tighten this down.

And once you to get it tight, it's all connected, you're ready to operate it with the remote. And then when you're not using the remote, you can just unscrew that, pull out your connection and put your dust cover right back on there.Now this does use an all steel four-stage planetary gear train. The gear box is right over here. The gear ratio is 505:1. This provides increased drum speed when compared with warm drives and the one, two or three stage planetary gear trains. It does use a free spooling clutch to ensure a fast rope payout, reduce wear on the motor. Right here as the clutch handle. Basically what you can do is turn that and that'll disengage it and you can pull out as much rope as you need. Once you get out as much as you need, then just flip it back to the engaged position, and then you can operate it with your remote. So just to disengage that way and it'll gauge that way, very easy to do.The other nice feature on this gearbox over here, there's a few screws here that you can loosen up and it'll allow you to rotate this gearbox 360 degrees, so if you don't want the clutch handle at the top, if you want it up in the front, you can rotate it that way, tighten it down and do it. If you want it in the back, rotate it that way. Either way you can put it to wherever you want the clutch handle to be.The rope on this is a 1/2 inch diameter, HMPE synthetic rope. It's strong as steel yet lightweight and safer to handle. The rope itself is 80 feet long, has a six foot woven polyester protective sleeve at the very end to protect it. You notice it comes with this 3/8 inch size steel clevis hook with the keeper and a nice nylon hand saver strap is included. The fairlead right down here that the rope goes through, it's a nice heavy duty CNC machine billet aluminum Hawse Fairlead. What's nice is the opening, they do have rounded features on the end here that helps when the rope gets to the sides and it's pulled sideways, prevents friction or any damage to the rope itself. And the finish on the Fairlead is nice silver anodized finish to resist corrosion.The housing this is in is a nice heavy duty steel housing with the thick side frames and the tie bars to create a nice strong winch body. Has a black powder coat finish, which is corrosion resistant. And the motor uses a Dacromet plated motor tube to resist internal corrosion.I want to give you a few specs and then give you some measurements on this. The rated line pull on this with a single layer of wire rope from the drum is 18,500 pounds static load. We mentioned the vehicle recovery capacity is 12,500 pounds. The motor on this is a 12 volt DC motor. Line pull at zero pounds. Power draw be 50 amps. Line speed, 18 feet per minute. The line pull at 18,500 pounds. The power draw would be 355 amps. The line speed is 3.6 feet per minute. And I mentioned the battery wires right here in the back.The size gauge wire is 2 gauge. Battery to lead length is about six feet. And the dimensions, the length of this, if we get out our tape measure, go from one end to the other end is about 27-3/4 inches long. Height on it, bottom to the top, about 12-1/2 inches tall. Width on it, it's going to be right about 10-1/2 inches wide. And the weight on this winch is about 174 pounds. It's a pretty heavy winch, very heavy duty. That's with the rope installed. Does come with the mounting hardware and a nice set of instructions that describe how to install everything and how it operates.But that should do it for the review on the Bulldog Winch Heavy Duty Series Off-road Winch with the synthetic rope, the Hawse Fairlead, and the 18,500 pound weight capacity..