Building a Chainsaw Powered Winch

So, is it possible to take this off-the-shelf UTV winch, and turn it into a chainsaw powered Pulling Machine? [Music] So on today's episode of "I want a chainsaw powered winch, we're going to take a crazy idea and bring it to reality. So the primary motivation for this project is to try and make a gasoline-powered winch that doesn't cost 800 plus dollars. now you can get one of those Lewis winches, which look like a really solid product, however they cost just a bit out of my range [the price is TOO-DAMN-HIGH] so we've got the next best thing a Harbor Freight winch and an extra chainsaw the 5000 pound might be slightly Overkill, that but that's not a bad thing other than throwing your back out when you're trying to Lug this thing along. so the first thing we did is buy this winch whenever it was on sale, and then let it sit over in the corner until all of the warranty has expired... that's not really a bad thing though, because well, we're going to destroy the warranty anyways... I mean, you got to be part of the reason that they actually have warranty stipulations. so there's like all of these electrical type stuff and connections, cables, we don't need any of that. we're going straight hydrocarbon power. so once you get rid of all the excess well that's still pretty heavy just start working out I guess but there will be a significant portion of this that disappears when you go to gasoline power now believe it or not we actually did some research on this you can download the manual here online before you buy it and they've got a nice diagram showing exactly what's inside, and it says we're going to remove the electrical motor portion of this we only need the gear reduction system to actually drive the cable. now that's a good thing having all the gear reduction over here, and the connection between free spool and drive all located on that side that means that we only have to replace the driving power source here and that's what we're going to do with the chainsaw in the form of a pulley. now I'm guessing that the most challenging part is going to be having a bearing support, and some type of way to actually drive the through shaft that goes underneath the spool there over to the gear reduction Drive if you can bridge that Gap you've pretty much got it licked. well that's enough talking about planning, let's start tearing this thing apart! annnnd we've immediately found out how to change the brushes... and with those two bolts we've basically got the motor separated now you look inside there there's the drive that that motor shaft runs which that looks to be a plain bronze bearing normally this motor here doesn't see a whole lot of side loading, however when you try and hook a chainsaw to it it's definitely going to want to pull to one side. that's going to take some thinking we're gonna have to come back to that. now this whole Contraption here this is an old steel 029 chainsaw that I have previously converted over to a chop saw, and it's worked well, but in the meantime I ended up getting a much larger legit steel chop saw [Music] so we really don't use this a whole lot. time for this thing to get repurposed. now the key feature on this chainsaw is the clutch here that I have welded a v-belt drive pulley onto. now we'll give you a brief overview of how this was done so if you don't just happen to have an entire scrap pile laying around that you could sort pulleys from, this is about the cheapest pulley right here I've found that gives you a metal V pulley about three inches in diameter that's what we got welded on the old o29 which actually uses a slightly bigger drum than the o26 but it'll still work so there's the drum off the o26 we just got to grind off this lip here and knock that bearing out on the bigger pulleys you can just weld it around the outside or like this one you can kind of weld around where the bearing was seated saws with the clutch and the drum outside the chain drive well those get a little bit more tricky it's going to be a custom operation to do this one option could be instead of welding the pulley directly onto the drum you may be able to attach one of the sprockets centered up in there and then you can kind of drop it onto the drum just like it would from the factory and another option altogether is to actually find a clutch and drum off of a concrete or demo saw they already come with a V drive a lot of times some of the newer ones are serpentines but if you can find a cheap used one or a cheap aftermarket that you realize is going to actually fit the threads correctly on your crank output you might be able to just buy a factory option to convert it to belt drive now just visualizing at this point but that's probably going to be how it's set up so what I'm thinking is you got the winch here the fair lead up front we'll have to get a drive system to drive the gear reduction and then we'll have a strong back plate or some type of a connection here all the way to the back where there's a shackle that you can anchor this thing to a tree a rock or whatever the drive direction of the chainsaw in relation to the winch actually means that it's going in the right direction kind of hard to see but it's getting there eventually just trying to sort through the pieces of scrap and see what will fit just kind of getting things marked up now the whole basic concept is you need to get the winch this way and this way and down it's a little bit of a free form activity use your imagination just find whatever scrap steel you have laying around doesn't have to be pretty you just need to have a fairly solid connection between the base of the winch and the chainsaw here the belt drive connection the two is really the only thing pulling these together here all the force of the winch is going to go directly from the cable into it and into your mounting point out the back now on the underside we're going to get a flat bar weld it probably or bolt It Whatever to this base plate of the winch extend it beyond the back of the saw and put a clevis right there one of the most critical parts of this whole thing is how are we going to hold the bearings trying to find an off-the-shelf bearing holder for this application is not as easy as you'd think this is actually a safety railing mounting base looks like a hub now Parts like that railing Hub specialty bolts man you can spend hours just cruising through the online McMaster Car catalog finding random bits of stuff to use for their non-intended purposes you got to be a little bit wary though because this was actually the first Hub that I bought it's made out of cast iron cast Steel thought it was going to be the right shape and size the dimensions online showed a four size that would just fit some other stock bearings one at five Ace OD I think they were but if you look close the inner diameter was only on those raised sections so the whole rest of the inside no good for our use but since we'd already started grinding on this thing no more returns we'll drop it off in inventory so this Hub right here really needs machined on the ID to open it up to fit those bearings however we don't have a lathe I mean sort of but that really doesn't count so we spent a bit of time thinking about how long it would take to try and grind the idea that to the proper size for the bearing a lot more direct route is going to be taking these bearings and grinding the OD down to the right size now luckily I end up buying a 10 pack of these because well everything gets cheaper in quantity so we're going to give it a shot on external Machining you want to keep the Sparks kind of even [Music] grinding the bearings took like three minutes instead of a half hour drilling out the Hub now when you're grinding down a bearing like that you got to take your time a little bit you don't want to put too much heat in here and take the hardness out of the races if you even start to see any blue and and temper marks developing on the steel it's gotten too hot so just take a little bit at a time to replicate that semi-square drive right there we'll just take a bolt and grind it to fit [Music] so we've got the aluminum new Hub here getting the fit up the holes didn't match but that's what drill bits are for able to reuse all the existing threaded holes for attaching The Hub and what we're going to do is have the bearings set up on the drive shaft like that they're spread out by this spacer tube now when these bearings on the shaft get slid down into the Hub here and then we'll tighten down these two set screws so we'll have a bearing spacer bearing and another nut to hold it all together and that set screw will hold this bearing here and keep the whole shebang from flying off hopefully now the whole point of having this Hub out here is so we can use two bearings and keep them spaced as far apart as possible that gives you more support when you're trying to pull on the belt pulley back like that now I was going to end up using this bolt but found out we needed a fully threaded thing here to basically hold all the components together and after taking some measurements and duplicating that sort of square drive that mates up right with the drive gear inside the winch so we measured once and we're grinding twice to get some extra clearance now there's a good chance that you wouldn't have to do as much grinding as I had to if you just measure the bolt length correctly first this thing's about 3 16 of an inch shorter than it could have been which would have actually spaced the pulley out a little bit further but yeah so the pool is off of a small block Chevy I believe they consider this a long water pump but whatever there's two different styles but this one's pretty obviously you can tell by the shape of it only concern I have about this is the lack of support on the inner structure right here normally the water pump would be bolted further out on this metal piece you're going to get some flex and some kind of deflection on this uh when the pool is getting pulled to the side so if this starts flexing and coming out of alignment we may have to weld a washer or something around the outside here but we're just going to run it for now see what happens we put some poor man's Loctite on those threads a few tack welds ought to hold this for now yeah that alignment looks right yeah that'll clear itself up there is a slight bit of concern about the automatic brake that is within these uh probably mentioned it already one of the main reasons I chose the 5 000 pound in this style is that all the gear reduction is over here in this side and you just have the motor input over here some of the winches have another planetary gear reduction so we're bolted on this side and the drive shaft that goes through the middle of it we don't want to deal with all that but there still is a break somewhere inside the drum here that I'm not exactly sure how or she'll have to look at the manual well who looks at the manual you could potentially run into an issue where winch is engaged you've got a load hanging on it and you basically need to take the tension off the cable before you can release this thing to get it to unspool again and if that happens we'll just go in here and completely disable that break and use the kickback brake on the chainsaw as the holding mechanism [Music] drilled a couple of holes made that main slot for the bolts on the chainsaw bar and then add an adjustment hole right there to use the existing tensioner on the chainsaw definitely got to drain all that bar oil out of there the roller fairly just bolts on to the standard mounting plate so luckily everything's just tacked up here and we welded the angle directly to the base plate might have some interference between the belt coming through here so we're going to basically break those tacks and drop this thing down a little bit more to try and keep the belt centered with on this Frame here we'll figure out how to run that thing eventually [Music] nothing the grinder can't take care of that should hold so at this stage we're realizing that a lot of this heavy angle and plate is probably unnecessary so that about does it a bunch of ugly welds later finally got that thing bolted on all right now obviously the origins of this project started from not wanting to pay full retail price for one of the production style chainsaw winches but it was also a mission sometimes when you just get an idea you gotta follow through with it might not be the most easiest or efficient route but you got to prove a point and one of the key features of this whole thing was trying to make that Hub area down there to transmit power from the chainsaw into the drive on this winch could have started off from complete scratch and just started fabricating you know cutting things grinding down shafts just welding everything up but I thought there had to be a way to use some sort of off-the-shelf Parts as a good starting Baseline I mean you can make anything fit another part with enough Welding and Fabrication that was sort of the route that we went when I converted that air compressor over the chainsaw power at the end it was a ton of work and a lot of really customized parts that weren't a great fit to just do an easy conversion a base setup like this is always going to be slightly different for each different individual saw but the overall concept is basically the same [Music] yeah just go to your random belt pile to find something that'll fit doesn't matter how many parts you have it's never the right one four dollar belt fresh off the internet now the 340 belt was too long and the 330 belt well it just barely fits just like mine after Thanksgiving we're going to totally rig up an ISR approved belt guard over here definitely not just operate it from this side [Music] all right time to try this thing out [Music] [Music] [Music] wow [Music] [Applause] [Music] well that was a full load test we started straightening out the bar on the bottom side all four tires locked up it's no 9 000 pound winch but they'll get the job done so I would say that the unfinished and unpainted status of this right now is just for testing and we'll come back and finish it but as long as it doesn't break it'll stay this way temporary is just one test run away from permanent and because it never fails if you actually finish a project it's just bound the brake leaving things in a Perpetual state of shambles means you never have to feel bad about working on it it's like riding a three-wheeler you're always on the edge of being out of control it's no surprise when you finally barrel roll it down a hill [Music]

Channel: toocheaptosmoke

Views: 28,508

Keywords: lewis winch, chainsaw powered winch, chainsaw wench, chain saw winch, logging winch, stihl chainsaw, atv winch, portable winch, utility winch, come along, power puller, homesteading, badland winch, badlands winch, harbor freight winch, harbor freight wench

Id: PHOU-gWy4jQ

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2023