Harbor Freight/ Badlands Winch Mod

Harbor Freight has decent ATV winches for a goof price, but there is one downside: they are wireless only. Sure, the remote is great, but its laggy and you run the risk of losing it or the batteries dying on the trail. So, using some general wiring you can easily have it hardwired to a switch mounted anywhere for less than a new winch.

yeah i did this awhile ago with the old version

I had only seen yours after I posted mine, im surprised it didnt come up when I was looking for tutorials. I used this one and just poked a bunch of stuff and it works great now.

It's not laggy, you mean the delay for the spool to stop. First i thought you ment you press the button, then it takes say like 2 seconds to spool.

Just throw a rubber hose or something on the wire when reeling it in and do it at bigger increments and your fine.

Nicely done, Doug! The remote is cute, but nearly pointless, IMO. I find that MOST of the time when I am winching, i need to steer. Full throttle is helpful too, for charging the battery so my foot is on the floor. Since I'm already sitting in the seat, I might just as well have a wired control that's not going to suffer from a dead control battery or screw up in some other way.

I mean really- wouldn't it SUCK to be mired in to the floorboards in goo, and you cannot winch out because of a stupid remote control issue? Right then and there, I think I'd just set fire to it...