Winch Install for Road Armor Bumper

Hi guys, sorry i havent been on the forum too much here lately but work has been NUTZ!!! Anyways the past few nights i have been workin late on the truck when i got off.... somehow i managed to single handedly install this big ol' 12,500 winch! A quick tip, i used kayak straps or ratchet straps to hold and help install the winch. It was tough getting the winch in the bumper at first though. You will have to "carefully" bend an ac line out of the way and massage past the radiator/ grill support bracket. Once inside the bumper i strapped the winch to the bull bar and used those to lower/ raise the bolt holes untill the lined up! Also if any of you are wondeirng I mounted this winch reverse from what most see (the clutch dissengage is on the passenger side instead of the drivers side). I did a lot of research online and couldnt find any negatives to doing it this way as long as the spool of the drum is correct. By mounting the winch this way it helped cut down on the wiring and made it a lot cleaner, but more on that later. Here is a picture of the rigged winch:

Now for the fairlead. I have read from other forums that this is the hardest thing to install and I would honestly have to agree, but i made some easy changes that made it all a breeze. On the road armor bumper the bolts for the winch are covered up by the fairlead so typically you would have to instlal the winch first and then the fairlead. Well that cools, but the problem is that you can get to the bolts that hold the fairlead in once the winch is installed!! Anyways before the install i added some pass through holes for the winch in the fairlead. This allowed me to install the fairlead before ever putting the winch in! Made it all really easy! here is a picture of that:

Now once i had the winch and Fairlead bolted in, it was on to the wirring. Now the kit came with some 4awg wire, but considering the size of this winch and the nature of a winch in general I didnt believe this would really be adequate. Read the forums a lot of the guys will agree that 4awg just isnt big enough for the amp needs of the winch. Anyways i decided to upgrade all the wiring with 2awg wire. I got the wire from Advanced Auto for 1.79 a foot and I ended up using about 25-30 foot for the entire install. I also ended up mounting the Control Box/Wireless box on the driver side firewall. I figured this would keep it away from most all water (If ive got water that high, Ive got BIGGER problems than the winch!! ). Here is a picture of the control box mounted:

I was able to use all of the accessories that came with the winch. I used the Terminal covers and the wireways/selas into the control box, but man were they tight!! Here are pictures of the wire routing and connections.








Now the last thing I feel that i need to do is buy some fuel or air hose that i can cover the ac line with so that it will be protected from contact with the radiator support or bracket. Hopefully i dont get hazed too much for picking a TUFF STUFF winch. From what i read online they are pretty dang good. I ordered it through Truck and Winch for 320 shipped with a 3 year warranty so I figured it was definately worth a shot. So far it works just fine!! Here is a picture of the finished product minus the grill... i'll get that put on today after work!

Hope this thread helps someone else out with their install.

Very nice work!

HOLY MEGA PIXELS!!!! see if you can resize those pictures so its not so tough to view....really hard to see whats going on....but great job though...looks good from what i could see.