I'm looking at buying a Terrafirma front bumper and I'd like to hear from any of you who have one how and where you've mounted the switch pack for your winch. One solution I've heard is to mount it under the hood and run the control cable out the back of the hood and in through the driver's window. The hood gasket apparently compresses enough to allow that, but I don't know quite where under the hood I would put the box. Somewhere on the right-hand side firewall or elsewhere near the cruise control mechanicals is an obvious choice but I don't think the cables would be long enough to make it back to the winch from there. I'll have to check cable length when I get home tonight.

 

Bueller? Bueller? Is there no one here who has a Terrafirma front bumper with a winch installed?

I checked the cable length and the three cables that run from the controller box to the winch itself are no more than 15 inches or so long; not long enough to make installing the box remotely a practical solution. Unless the cables could somehow be extended ... but that didn't seem like a good idea given the amps the winch draws.

 

I'm looking to get a Terrafirma front bumper and Warn winch soon. I was just planning on leaving the pack on it though and notching the grill. I guess whenever I get it I'll probably end up finding some different ways to mount it though. I'm thinking if you use a low enough guage wire you could get away with extending the wires. What about mounting it in the jack box? Or maybe near the power steering reservoir or brake reservoir. Not too much closer but it might work.

 

I'm finally getting around to installing my winch onto the Terrafirma front bumper I bought and installed in the summer.

I first thought I would mount the original WARN solenoid pack to the rear of the engine compartment fuse box, but once I came to understand how much it would cost for new cables of sufficient size to do that I stalled. I didn't want to use the compartment in the battery box between the battery and the jack because I use that to store other things. Plus that location would also have required new cables, they just wouldn't have been quite as expensive.

But then at some point I learned about Albright-style contactors that can be used in place of the old-style solenoids. I decided to try using one and mount it somewhere near enough the winch that I could use the original cables.

I thought I would make a simple bracket to mount the unit vertically on the same panel behind the grill to which the right-hand horn is mounted, but once I pulled the grill I found that there are existing holes that can be used to mount the unit as shown in the attached picture. The factory cables will be more than long enough.

From what I've read Albright-style contactors can be mounted vertically or horizontally, just not upside down. Given the locations of the existing holes the unit will be angled just a few degrees upward from horizontal.

BTW, unit I bought is marketed by Superwinch and sold by Summit Racing, among others. It is marked Made in Taiwan.

Next steps will have to wait until after Christmas.

 

Nice work. I did the same thing with mine. I remotely mounted the winch control plug to the front of the grill.


I also ran wires inside the truck for in-cab winch controls(this is awesome!). I used the Volume Up/Down buttons for winch in/out, along with a separate on/off switch so I couldn't bump the controls accidentally.

 

I remote mounted my winch solenoids in the battery box and added the winch remote plug to the grill. I've got pics of how I did it in the forums if you search my threads.

Hope that helps

 

After a few other non-Rover projects in the last couple of weeks I finally got around to finishing the winch installation using the new Albright-style contactor instead of the old-fashioned solenoids that came with the winch several years ago.

Instead of drilling a hole in the grill to mount the remote control socket I made a bracket in the style of a forum member from the U.K. who produced a really nice writeup about his winch installation several years ago. (He has a lot of good stuff at his website that's worth checking out.) The bracket is mounted to the mounting screw for the horn, just as in the linked example. It also seemed to me that connecting the wiring with the remote socket mounted in the grill would have been difficult.

We pulled out the winch rope to respool it and to test that everything worked as it should. I also cut out a section of the grill to enable use of the winch clutch lever.

Instead of needing to buy new, longer cables it actually took some work to route the original cables in close quarters. I may buy a shorter power cable to run from the battery to the contactor. As it is I have the original power cable routed all the way back and around the coolant reservoir and then forward to the battery. Weird.

I'm happy with how this installation turned out. I should probably go back in and add cable boots for the higher-amperage terminals on the contactor but that will have to wait for another day. I might also add some wire loom or zip ties to tidy up the low-amp contactor wiring.