This ‘God Winch’ Can Yank a Truck Up a Mountain Ridiculously Fast
You'd think the truck was driving itself straight up a vertical climb, but really, it's the engine-powered winch working its magic. The post This ‘God Winch’ Can Yank a Truck Up a Mountain Ridiculously Fast appeared first on The Drive.
There’s a reason every serious off-roader has a winch, and that’s because even the most capable rigs get stuck sometimes. They come in many shapes and sizes, some small enough to fit on an ATV and others big enough to pull a heavy truck up a mountain. Most that you’ll find on trails today are electric-powered, though it’s not uncommon to see PTO winches that use engine power to get vehicles unstuck. A God Winch fits in the latter category, more or less, but this one works so quickly that you’ll think the 4×4 is being snatched up to heaven in a hurry.
When I watched the God Winch in action for the first time, I thought the truck was driving itself up a straight vertical climb without any wheel slip. After replaying it three or four more times, I realized the engine was driving a spool at the back of the machine. “How the heck does that work?”
I reached out to the builder, Matthew Grieve of Grieve Brothers Racing in New Zealand, to learn.
Turns out, there’s such a thing down there as winch racing. It’s fascinating. As Grieve explained to me, teams consist of a driver and a runner, with the latter connecting the winch to trees and other sturdy anchors. I don’t know about you, but to me, that sounds way cooler than autocross.
Grieve and his brother Mark built a 1984 Suzuki Samurai for competition use. It runs a 250-horsepower Nissan SR20DET engine with a Toyota automatic and, importantly, a Land Cruiser split case transfer case to provide a power takeoff (PTO) output. Whereas the Samurai used to have a Warn 8274 winch on the front bumper, the Grieve brothers were inspired by the wild God Winches used in Malaysian rainforests. This, they decided, was the ticket to faster pull times.
“From there, I purchased a very old lathe, specifically for this project, and taught myself machining skills through YouTube videos,” Grieve told me.
The Samurai’s God Winch sits in the back of the rig and is built out of a 7.5-inch independent front suspension differential running a 4.10:1 ratio. “The diff drives an axle through the center,” Grieve said. “On the other side is a Toyota free-wheeling hub for the air-operated drum disconnect (or free spool).”
The setup pictured above is an evolution of the Grieve brothers’ first attempt at a God Winch. Initially, they used a Weston-style mechanical load brake to engage and disengage the system, similar to what you’d find inside a Warn winch or a crane hoist that keeps a load from free-falling. It worked well for a while, but it reached the point where one of the transfer cases kept getting stuck in gear.
“The gears would all mesh and I was unable to disengage the winch or put the transfer case in neutral,” Grieve said. “I managed to solve this with a three-disc race clutch that could handle some extreme torque, which allowed me to release tension to the drive system by pressing the clutch. It also allowed for an alternative way to stop winching quickly.”
It’s constantly being revised as the brothers learn what works and what doesn’t. There’s no easy way to know the system’s limits, but rest assured, they’re trying to find them. Supposedly, the winch is strong enough to snap a 12-millimeter Dyneema rope, which has a rated breaking strength of more than 25,000 pounds. Yowzers.
Hardware like this feels more industrial than automotive, and I think that’s what I love about it. Funny enough, Grieve has plenty of experience with that, too, as he’s an electrician for Kone Elevators by trade.
This God Winch is a culmination of all kinds of knowledge, yet the objective is simple: Get out of the stickiest situations as quickly as possible. And as you can tell by the videos, it does a great job of that.
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