Avoiding a winch rat nest

[kelLOGg]

I just didn't want to take the time to unwind and rewind neatly so I made the last few feet of pull on loose cable and ended up with this:



I haven't inspected it yet but I probably damaged cable. What do you other sawyers do to avoid rat nests like this? It's a hassle to unwind and rewind particularly when MileMarker says you shouldn't operate in unwind mode for more than 10 seconds to avoid overheating. It is quite difficult to manually unwind cable especially when it is cold. What do you do?
Bob

[Kbeitz]

I use a 16,500 Warn and it never get hot running with out a load.
But mine is so hard on batteries that I built a gas engine winch
using a garden tractor hydro tranny .

[AlaskaLes]

I truly hate wire winch line!!
My standard fix for this so far has been to spend a few dollars and change over to UHMW poly winch line or Kevlar winch line.
It's not cheap, but you can find fair prices for good rope and you will absolutely love it!
It's lighter, stronger, doesn't care how it's wound up, never gets flat spots, doesn't stick you with stray wire, and I'm sure there's more praise to be said...

We have winches on 4 different wheelers, an offroad jeep and the 12K recovery winch and main crane rope on the 10K boom crane.

So far we've got more than half converted from wire rope to the good stuff.
Not the cheapest upgrade, but hands down it's the best fix for your problem.
I just let it wind in however it wants and spool out and restack it before it starts hitting the guide bars on the outside perimeter of the winch drum.

[Kbeitz]

My brother has made Kevlar rope in his textile factory. If you want to see a real
mess you should see a machine that gets tangled up with that stuff. When a
strand of Kevlar get down in the machine and wraps around shafts and bearings
you have a BIG problem. You cant just cut it off. A hammer and chisel works best.

[kelLOGg]

I have been tempted to replace cable with rope but when I parbuckle logs onto the trailer the  cable is subjected to abrasion when pulling it under a log and contact with the log when reeling in, etc. I decided to stick with cable - I have a lot of it.

[Kbeitz]

I know that not all cable is created equal.
Some seem to last forever and some not so...

[sawguy21]

We switched to a rope called I think Spectra 12 for heli logging. It was light which was very important to us, easy to handle but did have it's drawbacks. It stretched and shrunk in diameter which made attaching cabtire to operate the remote hook a challenge. The loop around the thimble took a beating, we frequently had to cut the line and form a new loop which fortunately we were able splice ourselves. As kelLOGg found out it 's really important to keep tension on wire rope when rewinding, properly cared for it will last a long time.

[DanMc]

I would love to see a solution for this.  I have a winch on the ATV and another one on the trailer for winching on heavy loads.  The cable always gets messed up on the spool and then when you have to pull hard it tightens up on itself and creates a lot of minor kinks.  Seems like a winch should have a cable feeder that helps the cable to wind onto the spool neatly.  But then that would add a lot of cost and complexity, and it's probably not that much $ to just change the cable when it gets trashed. 

A low cost solution for this would be a great patent to own. 

[sealark37]

I solved this problem on my manual winch by using fiber-cored steel cable.  The guy at the wire rope distributor told me that it was the cheapest solution of several that would work.  As noted above, all steel cable is not created equal.  Regards, Clark

[kelLOGg]

I would love to see a solution for this. 

My 2500 lb Superwinch (on my mill) has a wide flat spring that presses against the cable keeping it winding/unwinding w/o kinking (almost). It does an acceptable job but not perfect. My 8000 lb MileMarker has nothing like that. The rat nest problem arises when the cable is not under tension and the cable (3/8" in my case) unwinds itself from the drum. Such a spring should help. When I have nothing to do I might look into adding one.
Bo

[sprucebunny]

I have put "Amsteel Blue" or "Dyneema" on all my winches.
Recently broke a 3/8 inch line on my Fetching Arch which I use a lot and looking on eBay for a heavier line...there is 1/2" line ( 20,000 pounds) 92 feet for about $110. It comes with a sleeve for protection and ends.

I can't find the supplier in Colorado that I got my other lines from.

I would rather buy a new line or fix an old one than deal with wire !!!