I just purchased one of Quadratecs winches. It comes with an aluminum hause fairlead. How on earth do you get the tow hook through the 1" opening? The hook and the metal loop that attaches to the synthetic rope will not fit through together. Am I doing something wrong?

 

Spool it out, disconnect the rope, feed it through fairlead, attach the rope, spool it back in!

 

What he said.

Jeeping is a constant learning experience!

 

Disregard.

 

Why would you not just disconnect the hook from the end by removing the cotter pin, put the loop through the fairlead and just put the hook back on?

 

Not sure I've ever seen a hook/thimble mounted that way. In fact, not sure I'd trust a cotter pin to handle the pull rating for a winchline. All I've seen are permanently swagged (stainless) or weaved with a very specific splice (synthetic).





Regardless, with a new winch you want to roll out all of the line and winch it back in under slight pressure before ever putting it to use. So you really wouldn't save any work even if you could just remove the hook and pull the line through.

 

That's how my Warn M8K came.

 

It's a solid hook, no pin to remove. Sounds like the only thing I can do is let out all the line, remove the line from the winch and then re-spool. Thanks everyone for the info

 

You want to do this anyway, to properly tension the rope. I go to the parking lot of an empty big-box retailer, wrap a tow strap around the concrete base of a light pole, attached the spooled out rope, and have my wife put pressure on the brake (in neutral) while I spool it back in, keeping an eye on making sure each revolution of rope is tight up against the previous. By properly spooling it, under tension, you can reduce the possibility of knifing the lower layers of rope by the upper layers.

Think about it this way, if the rope was "loose" on the drum, the first time you try to use the winch, it's going to tighten what is already on the drum before it can start bringing in what was spooled out. That tightening affect can have negative consequences on the lower layers - basically the upper layer will want to cut into and squeeze between the gaps in the lower layers. This will prematurely wear the rope at that point and can cause a failure under tension.

This applies to wire as well as synthetic rope.

 

Warn prespools the wire rope under tension, but not the synthetic. At least with my M8K. The synthetic does require respooling.