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Even though I have four large batteries sitting in the floor of my living room begging for attention, I have managed to ricochet off of them and on to another project. Partially because the weather is sunny and nice and I'm not worried about my old batteries dying at the moment. And also because I still haven't made up my mind where to put them. The project I'm involved with at the moment is mounting a small electric winch on the rack that carries my Yamaha WR450 on the back of the Arctic Fox, so that I will be able to winch the motorcycle up on the rack if I'm in a situation where pushing it up is too difficult. I bought the little 2500 pound capacity winch at harbor freight for about $65 I don't need one nearly that strong but that was the smallest winch they had. I figured that if I can push the 270 pound Yamaha up a ramp onto the rack that it shouldn't take much of a winch to do the job. I had a piece of square tubing welded to the bottom of the winch that was just the right size to slide over the existing square tubing on a piece that keeps the motorcycle from rolling off the rack. So now I can take the winch off and on the rack as needed with no tools involved. There's a few ways that I could use to power the winch, such as hooking it up to the truck battery with alligator clips or mounting a 12 Volt battery on the motorcycle rack some way. But in an effort to keep things as simple as possible I ran a number six wire from the battery box in the front of the Arctic Fox to a 12 Volt cigarette lighter plug that I mounted in the back of the Arctic Fox. So now, as soon as I can get one, I will put a 12 Volt cigarette lighter male plug on the winch so I can quickly and easily slide the winch off of the square tubing, unplug the cigarette lighter plug and store the whole thing inside the Arctic Fox. I don't believe that would work if I had a regular Walmart type cigarette lighter plug because I don't think it would carry the 15 amps I need to run the winch, so earlier I ordered a Marine grade 15 amp cigarette lighter plug off Amazon which I'm hoping will be okay. If I were trying to pull a heavy load with the winch I would need far more amps than that. But I think just trying to pull the motorcycle up the ramp should be no strain at all for the winch. Oh and I forgot to mention that the winch has a wireless remote that I can hold while guiding the Yamaha up the ramp, without that remote this whole project wouldn't work. theboondork
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