After a wait of about a month, I received my Quadratec Q9000 winch today. The UPS driver left it on my front porch and this precluded my bringing it inside to assemble it. First, the box. I was pleased to see that the box was still rectangular and that there weren't any holes in it.
As I flipped the box on its side, I heard some small stuff rattling around in there. Naturally, I was worried. But upon opening the box, I found that the worst damage had been sustained by the Quadratec catalog. No great loss; I have about five of them. Everything was well-secured, with the exception of a couple of bolts and washers.
The winch itself was well secured in the box. As is visible in the picture, the sides of the box have multiple layers of cardboard. They clearly intended for this thing to arrive at its location in working order. This winch was sold to me as a "second" due to some minor cosmetic damage that occurred en route to Quadratec. The blemishes were minor and no worse than what probably will be on there after several months of driving around with it on the front of my JK.
The additional components were in other boxes alongside the winch. The solenoid box looked fine, but the controller already looked like it had seen some use. Everything else looked great.
In the box were:
This is when I had to make a call to Quadratec. The instructions imply that there are two sets of mounting hardware for the solenoid: one for top-mounting it above the cable spool and another one for mounting it over the motor. My box was missing the top-mounting hardware. I had to call customer service to verify and to get them to send me the top mount.
Being an impatient sort, I went ahead and mounted the solenoid above the motor. When I get the other hardware, I will probably move it to the middle if I can.
So, dive into the instructions. Everything is very clearly explained. The cables are color-keyed to the ends of the connection studs, so it is very difficult to make a mistake in wiring it up. The connection hardware on the ends of the cables is heavy duty and attached firmly. I have a problem with this line regarding the cable connections from the solenoid to the motor: "be careful not to over-tighten". On the winch itself, it specifies that the connectors should be tightened no more than 10 Nm. My torque wrench only goes down to about 16 Nm, so I just used my trusty socket wrench and made them snug.
The winch having been assembled, I moved to the bumper of my JK to install the fairlead. The instructions are completely silent on the matter of installing it, but it's pretty straightforward. I had to decide whether to feed the bolts through from back to front, or the other direction. It turned out to be a good thing that I stuck the bolts through from the back; their length would have interfered with mounting the winch had I done them the other way. A word about this in the guide would have been nice; surely I am not the only first-timer who is going to try to install this winch.
Now, with the fairlead safely attached to the bumper, I could install the winch itself. My son's skateboard turned out to be a perfect cart for rolling it over to my rig. I was able to get it onto my Smittybilt SRC bumper with little difficulty; the fit was tight, but workable.
The winch mounts to the bumper using stout bolts. But the legs of the winch are not threaded internally. Instead, there are cutouts exactly the right size to accept flanged nuts and hold them in place while the bolts are tightened. The instruction guide recommends sticking them in place with a little bearing grease; it would have been good if I had heeded this advice because I had a bit of trouble getting one of the nuts back into its little alcove when they all fell out as I was positioning the winch.
Now it was time to attach the winch. I was able to tighten the two mounting bolts on the front of the winch, but the ones in back completely defeated me. This is not the winch's fault but a problem with the design of the bumper. My daughter was able to sneak a hand in there and get the last two bolts hand-tight, but I don't have a tool capable of getting in there to tighten the bolts. And getting a torque wrench on them to tighten them to the specified 50 ft.-lbs. of torque seems like an impossible dream.
Overall, I spent about two hours working on this project, including ten minutes waiting to talk to Quadratec. Not too bad for a first-timer working largely by himself.
Tomorrow, I will need to go visit my friendly neighborhood mechanic to see if he has a way to torque those two bolts. Since it isn't mounted properly yet, I haven't hooked it up to the battery. However, I have run the power cables back there and they reach the battery with several inches to spare. Once I have it hooked up, I will be able to give it a test pull and see how well it works.
In summary:
The Good
As I flipped the box on its side, I heard some small stuff rattling around in there. Naturally, I was worried. But upon opening the box, I found that the worst damage had been sustained by the Quadratec catalog. No great loss; I have about five of them. Everything was well-secured, with the exception of a couple of bolts and washers.
The winch itself was well secured in the box. As is visible in the picture, the sides of the box have multiple layers of cardboard. They clearly intended for this thing to arrive at its location in working order. This winch was sold to me as a "second" due to some minor cosmetic damage that occurred en route to Quadratec. The blemishes were minor and no worse than what probably will be on there after several months of driving around with it on the front of my JK.
The additional components were in other boxes alongside the winch. The solenoid box looked fine, but the controller already looked like it had seen some use. Everything else looked great.
In the box were:
- The winch :whistling:
- Solenoid
- Wired controller
- Roller fairlead
- Bolts and nuts for mounting the winch and fairlead to the bumper
- Side mount plate for the solenoid
- Installation instructions - full-color, on glossy paper
- Owner's manual - 47 pages, glove box size
- The usual Quadratec catalog
This is when I had to make a call to Quadratec. The instructions imply that there are two sets of mounting hardware for the solenoid: one for top-mounting it above the cable spool and another one for mounting it over the motor. My box was missing the top-mounting hardware. I had to call customer service to verify and to get them to send me the top mount.
Being an impatient sort, I went ahead and mounted the solenoid above the motor. When I get the other hardware, I will probably move it to the middle if I can.
So, dive into the instructions. Everything is very clearly explained. The cables are color-keyed to the ends of the connection studs, so it is very difficult to make a mistake in wiring it up. The connection hardware on the ends of the cables is heavy duty and attached firmly. I have a problem with this line regarding the cable connections from the solenoid to the motor: "be careful not to over-tighten". On the winch itself, it specifies that the connectors should be tightened no more than 10 Nm. My torque wrench only goes down to about 16 Nm, so I just used my trusty socket wrench and made them snug.
The winch having been assembled, I moved to the bumper of my JK to install the fairlead. The instructions are completely silent on the matter of installing it, but it's pretty straightforward. I had to decide whether to feed the bolts through from back to front, or the other direction. It turned out to be a good thing that I stuck the bolts through from the back; their length would have interfered with mounting the winch had I done them the other way. A word about this in the guide would have been nice; surely I am not the only first-timer who is going to try to install this winch.
Now, with the fairlead safely attached to the bumper, I could install the winch itself. My son's skateboard turned out to be a perfect cart for rolling it over to my rig. I was able to get it onto my Smittybilt SRC bumper with little difficulty; the fit was tight, but workable.
The winch mounts to the bumper using stout bolts. But the legs of the winch are not threaded internally. Instead, there are cutouts exactly the right size to accept flanged nuts and hold them in place while the bolts are tightened. The instruction guide recommends sticking them in place with a little bearing grease; it would have been good if I had heeded this advice because I had a bit of trouble getting one of the nuts back into its little alcove when they all fell out as I was positioning the winch.
Now it was time to attach the winch. I was able to tighten the two mounting bolts on the front of the winch, but the ones in back completely defeated me. This is not the winch's fault but a problem with the design of the bumper. My daughter was able to sneak a hand in there and get the last two bolts hand-tight, but I don't have a tool capable of getting in there to tighten the bolts. And getting a torque wrench on them to tighten them to the specified 50 ft.-lbs. of torque seems like an impossible dream.
Overall, I spent about two hours working on this project, including ten minutes waiting to talk to Quadratec. Not too bad for a first-timer working largely by himself.
Tomorrow, I will need to go visit my friendly neighborhood mechanic to see if he has a way to torque those two bolts. Since it isn't mounted properly yet, I haven't hooked it up to the battery. However, I have run the power cables back there and they reach the battery with several inches to spare. Once I have it hooked up, I will be able to give it a test pull and see how well it works.
In summary:
The Good
- Winch is solidly packaged.
- Installation instructions are easy to understand.
- The owners manual is very thorough and easy to keep in your rig.
- Missing parts.
- Incomplete installation instructions, especially the lack of a parts list.