Back in the good old days winches used to be beyond reach for most 4WDers budgets, until recently with technological developments there are now affordable good quality 4WD Winches on offer like the 4WD Supacentre Winch Range, they are packed full of features to make recoveries easy for everyone no matter what your application.

A rear winch might sound a little bit gimmicky, but trust us it’s far from that and will soon be your favourite mod on your rig. Typically, when we find ourselves in places that we need to pull out the winch rope, the last place you want to end up is further forward. This is doubly the case when you’re 4WDing solo. I’ve also found that having a rear winch is especially handy if you happen to tow trailers off-road. We’ve seen a rear winch used a to recover trailers stuck deep in the mud where the trailer needed to be unhitched to safely recover the stuck vehicle.

It’s also really handy if you want to pull your trailer from the side via a snatch block to get around some tight trees and steep sections of track.

PICK THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB

Depending on your vehicle we recommend getting a winch that is rated between 1.5 and 2 times the fully loaded weight of your vehicle, this will factor in the full load of the vehicle and the suction of mud or wet sand, after all you aren’t going to pull your rear winch cable out to help reverse up your paved driveway.

A great example of a winch rating calculation in action is on one of Australia’s most popular dual cab ute the Toyota Hilux, which has a GVM (maximum total weight) of 3000kg, this gives us an ideal calculated winch rating range between 4500kg (9920lbs) and 6000kg(13227lbs).

We have seen excellent results from the boys in the 4WD Action team using the Domin8r X 12,000lb Winch from 4WD Supacentre this winch has a rating of 5443kg (12,000Lb) which falls smack bang in the middle of our ideal range for the Toyota Hilux.

GIVE YOURSELF PLENTY OF ROOM

Have a good look at the rear of your chassis and make sure you have enough space to fit the winch you have chosen. You might have to space your tray up to give you more room back there or move some items around for better clearance. Also, make sure that where you position your winch wont foul on anything and that the rope from your winch is free from rubbing on anything at most typical winch angles from where you’ll mount the fairlead.

HOW AND WHERE TO MOUNT

We had a fabricator measure and cut a 6mm plate to form the base on which to mount the winch and another piece of 6mm plate welded at 90 degrees with an opening for the fairlead. There are a lot of forces that come into play when winching a bogged 3 tonne 4WD out of the mud, so we recommend that you don’t use anything less than 6mm steel.

You want to avoid welding and drilling into the chassis as much as possible, as this can weaken your vehicles structure, so look for existing bolt holes that you can use to mount your plate. Your winch plate must be extremely solid and not come loose after winching or after vibrating on long sections of corrugation. As for bolts, we used M10 high tensile bolts with nylon-locking nuts as they can take massive amounts of strain without failing.