Winch mount

I know this has probably been covered ad nauseum, but what is the cheapest solution to mounting a winch to the front of our trucks? Don't feel like paying $1200 for a bumper. Want to go with a 10000 or 12000 lb, so it's got to be tough. I've tried to find a front receiver hitch but it doesn't seem anyone makes or for our trucks.

Someone on here made or was installing a winch behind the factory bumper.  I've not found it, but you might via an "advanced search".

I have a front receiver on Big Blue, but that's facilitated by the Warn winch bumper as I mounted the receiver to the bolts that hold the winch on.  And those bumpers are made of unobtanium, so I understand why it makes sense to mount the winch behind the bumper.

I tried to find said post to no avail. Since I have the front clip off, now is a great time to plan this. I'll see what I can come up with, but I'd sure love some suggestions from the forum!

I've always thought you could make a new crossmember to go right behind the bumper and mount a winch on it.  But I've not done any measurements to see if it would work.

That might have been me - I was working on doing this in Rocky. I never completed the task but do believe it's possible. The Rocky build thread is pretty long but if you page through it there are a few pages of folks helping me brainstorm this.

I was going to use this winch plate: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08K7J1SSH. I see it's no longer available, but it's a common item other vendors sell. You just need the same rough dimensions. What I found was that this plate will JUST fit between the front frame rails, at least for my '81 F-250 (2WD). The fit isn't perfect, you have to notch the two rear corners, but it's very close. It rests on the frame rails just enough that if you drill your holes right, you could get one bolt down through them on each side. Then I was going to make side brackets out of some 4x6" angle to connect to the sides of the frame rails, and finally I was going to use two pieces of angle iron to make 45-degree reinforcements from the rear of the winch plate to about a foot or so further back on the rails. This would help make a winching load more of a "pull" to avoid twisting the frame rails.

If you want, I can sketch all this out and send some pics of what I was up to. But no guarantees on fit, you'll need to mess with it a bit.

You need a very low profile winch. I went with the Zeak 12,000lb: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MXBXV44. It's total overkill and you may want to go smaller. You will not have room to mount the control box on top, obviously, so you need to plan that out. There's plenty of room in a Bullnose to stash it somewhere behind one of the headlights, but the cables that come with most control boxes aren't long enough so you have to extend them. And with heavy duty cable, too, so plan for that.

You also won't have access to the free-spool lever. I had planned to work out some type of extension, probably just a simple steel rod with a pair of u-joints top and bottom to allow for a bit of misaligment when you route it behind the grill. I was going to try to have this come out just under the hood, in front of the radiator, so you'd pop the hood and it would be there. I didn't see a good way to have the handle fit, so I was going to use a long socket extension as my rod, with the "socket" portion at the top, and just use a socket wrench (or make something simple, welded) as a removable handle.

They make fairlead hinge plates to hold a front license plate, a requirement here in CO, two plates. I was going to put my fairlead right on the front bumper, a low profile fixed one, not a roller style. (One came with the winch.) And then the plate on top of that obviously. You have to cut the bumper to do this.

I'm 95% sure all of this is doable. But it takes some doing. The biggest angst is drilling the frame rails. You're going to weaken it where you do that, which mostly isn't that critical because the only spot the winch could possibly sit is RIGHT at the front, and this happens to be forward of anything important.

Bear in mind these frame rails were never designed for winching loads. I'm not a structural engineer, but you can tell just looking at them that they're pretty thin. The area we're talking about normally has only one job - holding the front bumper. Aside from the bumper's weight, the only load it should normally ever see is in a collision, so it's designed to resist being pushed, not pulled, and even in the 80's they were figuring out crumple zones for safety so I don't think it's meant to be massively strong. If you have welding skills, you may want to consider welding reinforcement plates into the area.

I wasn't planning to use this much. I just happened to get a great deal on a 2WD when I really wanted a 4WD. In my opinion, a 2WD can go a lot of places you'd normally want a 4WD for, if you have a winch and some determination. I wouldn't be off-roading with it, it was just going to be a safety feature. We have a homestead with a long, hilly dirt road. In the winter, mud and snow can make it really difficult to get up and down, there's no cell service, and even if there was, AAA would be over an hour away. My thought was if I got stuck I could self recover using the winch. As long as you aren't too bogged down, sometimes even a few hundred pounds of a straight pull off a tree is enough to get you through something in a few minutes that would have been a half hour messing with traction boards and shovel work.

Thank you!  That is a very good description of what I remember reading, but couldn't find.  And it is all in one place.  

I'm sure a sketch would help him, and me as well, visualize it.

As for strength, I've used Big Blue's 12,000 lb winch several times and had no problems.  But all of my pulls have been straight on, which is where the frame is quite strong.  So if you are pulling at an angle the 45-degree reinforcements you mentioned would be a big help.

Thanks. That's a really cool idea, but it won't work on my truck as it is a 4x4. The leaf spring mounts are right in the way! I'm trying to come up with something, but it's not easy. I do have something I want to use for the receiver. Its a huge piece of 1/2 angle iron that once made up part of the rear bumper, and it has a receiver built in. Tow hooks also. I just need to figure out how to mount it and what to put above it. I'll try to get a picture up soon.

You're right. My option is only for a 2x4.

Have you considered moving the bumper forward? This is a relatively easy thing to do, a little ugly but hey it was a chunky beast to begin with. You don't need to move it forward the full depth of a winch. Just 6" or so. That's about enough that if you fabbed some bull bars up it would sort of look like it was meant to be that way...

Sorry for the late reply. I'm looking at trying to use a giant piece of angle iron I have. It has a receiver and tow hooks built in. Funnily enough, it used to be part of the rear bumper on the same truck! Thing is probably 1/2" thick.