Mounting winches amidships?

On the 101, going to the front fairlead the cable does 2 90deg bends to line up with it via 2 fairly small pulleys. To the rear its a straight pull. Changing from front to rear does involve a fair bit of buggering around with the cable.

Sean

73FL74 101GS 1984 110 2.5NA Medway Military Vehicle Group

Have a look at this:

Productionised as an attachment to John Foers Ibex - now sold by Ricardo. There's a one paragraph description on their horrible website: This is the description of the 101's arrangement:

Ian, This is how Oshkosh Truck handled their midship winch mount.

Yes, I've just found that I already have the 101 parts manual for some reason, and it has diagrams of it in there. The 101 cable spool is quite narrow however, which would help with even spooling of the cable, unlike more conventional winches.

Still useful though, I might even have to nick some of the parts!

I don't like that solution at all, for a start the offset angle of the cable pull onto the winch drum isn't going to help with spooling the cable back evenly, secondly the effective length of the cable in one direction is halved as you have no choice other than to use the pulley to attach to the anchor point, and thirdly in both pulling directions the cable is offset too far from the centre of the vehicle for my liking. I don't know why he bothered patenting that, I'd have dumped that idea at an early stage.

I lost the will to live very quickly on that website, the text being two pixels wide on my 800x600 "TV" screen on the lounge computer doesn't help...

Cheers, I found the winch exploded diagrams in the 101 parts manual, which gives me an idea, the PDF you linked to has some better diagrams, particularly on the rear setup. I like the cable exit points with the twin pulley wheels to allow sideways pulling! I'm not sure if a fairlead (if that's what they're called) roller setup is as good.

Heh, they do a hybrid version of their 8x8 million-tonne monster, should keep the bunny huggers happy ;-)

Flash-laden website though :-( Hard to find anything useful as usual.

I've always wondered at the logic of the mid mount on the 101s - was it done to shorten the overall length of the vehicle, because having to change the cable direction whilst upto your family jewels in cold water does not appeal at all. Maybe it was just a method of getting the squaddies to drive carefully - "Oops I'm stuck", "You stupid tosser, now get out in that freezing water and re spool the winch cable and pull yourself out backwards"

If vehicle length was not a problem I'd have gone for a PTO driven capstan front and rear.

Derek

It wouldn't be nice, but I suspect that being able to change the direction of pull was the logic behind it, as well as not having to mess up the weight distribution, which could be more important on a machine intended to carry loads than we might suspect.

I'd try and rig up something similar, but every time I've ever been stuck, it's been hard to get to either one side of the truck, or the underside of the truck. Sod's law would dictate that the winch would be set up for a front pull, I'd need a rear pull and the side the winch was on would be submerged in mud!

Mind you I still might go for that option and have the hand-winch in the back of the truck to fend off bad luck.

It's quite surprising that they're now making them in hybrid diesel-electric versions, although perhaps not so surprising when you remember that diesel locomotives work that way, and they make the Oshkosh look like a kid's toy.

...and Derek spake unto the tribes of Usenet, saying...

400 mile range, 155 gallon tank - that's 2.5 mpg. Makes a Rangie look economical.

On Wed, 5 Apr 2006 20:38:57 +0100, Roger wrote (in article ):

I suspect it may have something to do with the vehicle's military heritage. The 4 ton 4x4 Bedford truck which was the next size up military utility vehicle from the 101 has a mid mounted winch with a vertical axis on the drum. It also had a very large drum diameter - always put me in mind of the winch on a ploughing (steam) engine.

Nick.

I always considered this an elegant solution, the drum spooling is a red herring from the way the drawing is set out, the rear fairlead can be narrow. OK the rearward pull is double the force and half the available rope travel and the forward pull is through a load of rollers but it does the job.

AJH

Hi Group Another military vehicle, the ancient petrol engined Scammell 6x6 had the winch amidships and could be routed to front or rear with pulleys at the rear and vertical rollers at the front. It was no fun switching it around especially in temperatures exceeding 100F. Alan

It's probably the way to go once the technology is sorted I expect they will be more efficient than conventional 4wd with less energy loss ( friction diff loads etc).Couple that with regenerative braking which has been around for a long time the only missing piece in the jigsaw is a battery or rather power storage medium that doesn't have the weight penalty of the stuff available now it can't be long coming? ( the bridge carriers I saw are just the babies of the range makes you wonder what they make for a really big job) Derek

Well after having a think about it, it's not such a bad idea, and the off-centre bit is really an installation-specific thing, the idea still holds up. If it could be made re-routable as well then that could sort out the niggles regarding half the length in one direction and the convoluted path in the other if the need was great enough.

I'm not sure how much winch power gets sapped by using rollers and pulleys to guide it in any of these various installations though. If you route a cable through an angle then a lot of force is going to get put on the pulley, and that force has to come from somewhere. Damn my comprehensive school level physics ;-)

Rather that than digging a Scammell out ;-)

The environmental lot seem to like it, although I'm not so sure they'll like it when they look at the difference between the materials used in a conventional drivetrain and an electrical drivetrain. Lots of nasty metals used in electrical drivetrains and batteries.

I like the way the Oshkosh can "creep silently" on battery power, one of those things "creeping" anywhere doesn't really fit does it!

On Thu, 6 Apr 2006 07:27:48 +0100, Ian Rawlings wrote (in article ):

Energy = force x distance. The rollers don't move in the direction of the force so they don't use any power. They do use some in the friction of the bearings, but again energy = force x distance, except this time distance is the number of rotations of the roller and force is the friction in the bearings. So long as the bearings are sound, they won't require a lot of force to turn so they won't use any significant amount of power.

The biggest wastage of energy will probably be the flexing of the cable itself, which will be greater the tighter the bend the cable goes around, but that would manifest itself as heating of the cable, and at the power your winch will have available, the heating would be noticeable if it was a significant proportion of the total power of the winch.

Nick.