coloradoinsane

Hey guys. My dad and I have been working on and offroad park for about the last 5-6 years. We dont have any type of heavy equip. so we are always using chains, cables, winches, ****** blocks, etc to make our boulder runs and dragging trees out of the way. Obviously our winches see a lot of use through the year with a lot of heavy loads. We both have smittybuilt xrc8/milemarker sc8 with the steel cables. They have worked fine but they are for the weekend wheeling (our opinions). The are loud and have always sounded like they are dying while pulling, they have painfully slow line speed, and the controllers suck (hard to push for contact, connection at the winch always has issues). We are looking at either going with a Superwinch 12.5i-sr (only reason for going with the 12.5 over the 9.5 is its basically the same $) or something like the warn 9.5ti. as you can tell we favor the fixed solinoid with the "bridge" over the cable. waterproof is also important to us as we go through a bit of water crossings when we head up in the mountains. That is one reason we favor the superwinch. Again, to finish this off we use our winches a lot! Speed is important to use. Speed isnt so much of an issue under full load but when we are dragging a rock with only 2000lbs resistance it would be nice to be near the 50 fpm like the warn/superwinch rather than 15ish like we have now. Please only post from experience, not interested in hearing how your brother heard from a cousin who was told by an old wheeling buddy that his dad used a "xxxxxx" and loved it . Thanks guys!

Xj88

Had the warn 9500 on my Toyota and liked it
The warn thermometric winches look pretty legit.

The m8000 is tried and true..not a bad choice.
the newer vr8000 seems to have decent reviews too

Four play

All the guys I have talked to wheel alot and use winches a lot. They all said one thing "pay the extra for a warn". You will be a lot happier. You get what you pay for in my opinion

coloradoinsane

Thats the reason I was looking at either superwinch or warn. Both have great reviews, my only issue with warn is I know of a few guys who have had water issues. The new Talon series superwinch seems up to par with warn, just not sure yet.

coloradoinsane

They both have slow line speed again which is the big killer for us. looking for around 60 fpm with no load. those only run about 40 which puts us right back where we are.

Tom95YJ

WARN 8274 !

Rock Toy

I ran a Warn 9.5XP, it is Warns' fastest winch under load. The Warn 8274 is Warns' fastest line speed winch with no load. The 9.5XP worked great and it's no load line speed is close to that of the 8274.
I'm running a HS9500i on my Cherokee it is fast and all the winch a 4000 lb rig needs.

coloradoinsane

Looking at Warn website its showing no load line speed is 37 fpm and 16 at 2000, about the same as the smittybuilt. Where it wins over is with the higher loads but thats where we arent worried about speed. We are looking for the speed around 0-2000 lb range. No one here has tried either the superwinch talon series or the 9.5 cti? The 8274 is a little out of my price range......plus they are butt ugly in my opinion

XJriot

I have the tiger shark 9500 and like it. Talon should be just as good

coloradoinsane

how is the noise level on it? does it sound smooth as it operates? Like I said in the initial post our milemarkers and smittybuilts have sounded like gears grinding in a tranny (ok not THAT bad, but sounds like crap). How dos the suprwinch sound?

TitletownXJ

85% of the guys in our Jeep club run Badland's by Harbor freight. I have a 9k and its great I've used the crap out of it and it seems to held up good in the rough WI winters. It cost me 353 with a 2yr warranty on it.

coloradoinsane

Well we have had no reliability issue with the ones we are running excpt for the noise and the controller, we would just stick with what we have rather than going with the harbor frieght ones as the line speed is slower than the smittybuilt. We are trying to speed up the process of moving the boulders onto the trails as we have already spent tons of time on them. We have put our winches through more than most would have seen in 30 years of wheeling.

Rock Toy

Sorry, I don't know what Smittybuilt rates their winches line speed at, but I've pulled downed trees off the trail with my Warn 9.5XP and I've watched guys use their Smittybuilt winches to do the same. The XP was almost 3 times as fast, I didn't weigh the downed trees and maybe the one the Smittybuilt pulled was a little heavier, but it didn't weigh much more it it did weigh more.

coloradoinsane

yea, the smittybuilt xrc8 gets loaded down a bit faster than the warn 9.5. that extra 1500 lbs pulling strength keeps the speed up longer for the lighter loads. We are just looking at trying to make this the last winch we have to buy rather than buying one and wishing we had gone a little better with it. I hate buyers regret, I want to make sure we are happy with what we get. I wish we knew more people nearby that we could test a few out side by side! Im just going by what each company lists, only thing is those are just numbers, real world tests would be much different Im sure. The smittybuilt may in all reality pull a lot slower than listed. We just get tired of waiting a few minutes just to spool in our winch to move to the next spot and pull another rock. We use them for about 6 hrs each weekend, it would be nice to cut down on that time.

RubberSideUp

9.0Rc is great if weight and quality is of importance: http://www.warn.com/truck/winches/src/9.0Rc.shtml