Fulton XLT Single Speed Winch - 8" Long Handle, 20' Strap and Cover - 1,500 lbs

Video Transcript for Fulton XLT Single Speed Winch Review

Hi everyone. Aiden here with etrailer. Today we're going to be taking a look at the Fulton XLT single speed winch for our boat trailers. So this is going to have two modes. We've got the reverse right here, so I can just put a little pressure on the handle since it's tight. Flip it back to the reverse position.

And now whenever I crank it backwards, it will loosen the strap. So you can see just how easy it is to get undone. And then the same goes for the reverse. When we hook up the strap, flip it into the active position, and turn the crank, it will tighten up that strap nice and secure. So it's not going anywhere.

The handle itself is eight inches long and the end of the handle here swivels. It's got enough room for my hand to get on there most of the way And it's pretty comfortable to do. I'd say overall, (handle clanking) it's got very smooth operation throughout. And even as you start to get into the tighter settings, (handle clanking) it turns pretty easily and you can tell when it's about done so you don't have to worry about over tightening it too much. Switching between the different modes is really easy to do as well.

Sometimes you just have to put a little bit of pressure on the handle to get it to flip back. But if you know to do that, it's very straightforward. The included strap is 20 feet long, two inches wide, and has a 1,500 pound capacity. You can upgrade to a bigger, longer strap if you wanted to. Probably not wider but longer.

There's enough room inside here for a bit of a longer strap I'd say. And then over top the whole thing, you've got this housing that's going to provide a nicer look in my opinion. Just a more complete finished look to hide all the moving parts but keep things out of there. It's not totally enclosed by any means, but it will help any sort of flying dirt, debris when we're going down the road from maybe kicking up and making its way inside to all the moving parts. The top cover plate here is removable. If you get a trim panel tool in the sides to remove the locking tabs and undo that little hook on the bottom, you can get access to all the internals. Whether it's for our first time installation, reaching down to those mounting bolts that aren't included but are there, or getting to any of the internals to maybe install a new strap if ours is worn down or broken, we can do that. Plus all of the bolts for all the moving parts are easy to see on the outside so we can get to them really simply. All the metal components underneath our carbon steel construction. The gears are a high carbon steel, so that's going to be extra durable. So you don't have to worry about that wearing down too much. And then all the metal pieces have a finish over top to help resist rust and corrosion since this is going to be around water quite a bit. The insulation process is pretty straightforward. Like I mentioned briefly, mounting hardware is not included, but you do have some slotted holes. So once you do get your own mounting hardware, it's easy to adjust it to maybe some existing holes that are on our trailer from a preexisting winch that we maybe removed. Let's check out the installation process now. For our installation, we need to remove the winch first. If yours is broken or already removed, you can skip ahead and just watch for the new one being put on. And if you're only replacing the strap, we do have strap replacements so you don't need to replace the whole assembly. But we're going to get ours undone by flipping it into the loosening position, unhook the hook from our boat, we're going to just tighten it up so I don't have as much excess strap laying around, and grab my socket and undo these nuts on the bottom. (power tool whirring) And with the last one removed, this should just lift straight off of that mounting plate and we can mount up the new one. Now the new winch doesn't come with its own hardware, but it does have spots underneath that match up up with the existing mounting holes on our plate for our trailer. The longer slotted hole on the bottom, that will allow for movement to adjust the different sizes as well as these two slotted holes at the top. Plus some other holes if that fits your application of it better. So after picking up your own hardware, we can drop it down through the top. I've removed the cover, it just pops into place or out of place, so you got a little bit more room to get your hands in there. I'm going to drop two bolts down through those slotted holes. They don't really go in super easily, but if you can get your hands in there enough to get it to drop down through the bottom, it'll adjust side to side from there. And the hex head on the top of the bolt should bind itself up against the lip right here, so you don't have to worry about holding it on with a wrench luckily. I'm going to drop this down just to hold it in place. And then for the more rear facing mounting hole, I can get my hand in probably down through here. Now this hole is going to be a little bit trickier just because you've got way less room to work with in here. You might find it helpful to maybe unspool the strap a little bit. But I think it's going to be okay and doable without that. After messing around with it for a little bit, if you grab the bolt with some needle nose pliers and feed it in through the back underneath that roll of strap, it's pretty darn easy to get it to drop in place. And eventually, once we start working on the nut underneath, we can hold the top of the wrench pretty easily. We're using a lock washer and a nut for our application. You could use a lock nut as well or instead of what we're using. It really just comes down to whatever you pick up. So we'll get those loosely installed for all three of those bolts, and then we can get them tightened down. (power tool whirring) For these two front ones, remember they're kind of bound against that plate there, so I don't need to worry about having a wrench on the bolthead. (power tool whirring) And for the rear facing one here, it's easy enough to sneak a wrench in right behind, grab onto that bolt head, and use this for the nut underneath. (power tool whirring) The final piece of our puzzle here is the handle that doesn't come attached right out of the box. And you can see that the hole there has some flat size that will line up with some flat size here to keep it in place. We can run that nut back down by hand as far as it'll go, and then resecure it with our socket. (power tool whirring) (handle clanking) The only thing left to do is hook it up. I'm going to flip it into the position where it will extend the strap, (handle clanking) get it onto our hook, and then tighten it back down. (handle clanking) Then we can take that cover plate that we removed during the install process, pop it back into place, And that's it. The install process is very straightforward. Aside from providing your own hardware, you've got slotted holes that can adapt to your existing holes on your trailer making it really easy to mount up. Thanks for watching.