Dutton-Lainson Hand Winch - Single Speed - Freewheel - 15' Strap - 1,200 lbs

Video Transcript for Dutton-Lainson Single Spee Hand Winch Review

Hey everybody. Welcome to etrailer.com. I'm Bobby and today, we're taking a look at the Dutton-Lainson single speed hand winch with a 1,200 pound weight capacity rating here at etrailer.com. So, this is gonna be an excellent way if you guys wanna start loading up your boats, hay bales, whatever, what other, other use you might have for a pulling winch, this guy can definitely handle it which is gonna be great. I really like the outer coat covering we're getting here on our winch too. And in terms of what this guy can do, I think it is pretty capable.

But we do have to kind of get a couple of things out of the way. Which winch is right for us. Well, if you're talking in terms of boating here, you are gonna have to keep a couple of things in mind. The big one is gonna be how heavy is our boat, right That's gonna be the main draw of actually finding which winch is right for us. And how do we find the weight of our boat Well, it's gonna be really easier to just go ahead and take your trailer and your vehicle up to a weigh station.

Find your trailer's weight without your boat on it, load up your boat, and then take your boat there, and then actually find out that weight. That can be very helpful. Hopefully, we already know it at home. And usually, there's some stickers on the inside as well to help let us know exactly what we're working with. But once we've actually found that weight, we need to keep in mind the capabilities of our winches.

So, here at etrailer.com, we highly recommend at least get half of the weight of your boat to that capacity rating. So, what I mean by that, if you got a 2,000 pound boat, you're gonna need that 1,000 pound winch. Now, if you're talking in terms of safety and ease of use, I would highly recommend looking about 3/4 of your total boat weight. So, if you got a 2,000 pound boat, maybe a 1,500 pound winch is gonna do you. Now, that half rating, still gonna make it happen for yourself.

However, it is gonna be a little harder, gonna take a little bit more work, and it's not quite as safe. So, if you wanna just go ahead and make the easy decision, I always recommend bigger is better. Gonna be safer and way easier to use. And it really doesn't break the bank just to go ahead and give ourselves a nice little upgrade, which can be nice. But enough about picking which, which winch is right for us. Let's go ahead and break down this winch. So again, our winch here today is going to have a 1,200 pound capacity rating. Now, working with our boat here today, I'd probably say that's the lowest I wanna go. That's actually, given our high, put me right at that half rating. And personally, for this boat, I'd go a little bit higher. But it's gonna be great to actually demonstrate this guy for you guys here today. Simply put, we do have a single speed action here, and our handle is just gonna work singularly on that single drive thread, drive shaft for ourselves. What this drive shaft has given us though is a 4.4 to one gear ratio. What that ratio entails for ourselves, basically, it's gonna take us 4.4 revolutions of our handle to get one turn of our drum. Now, that is gonna give you a nice mechanical advantage though, making it a lot easier to actually pull that boat in. How do we make it work Well, with our ratchet pawl, since in this position here towards the top, towards our gears, it actually is gonna allow us to ratchet in our strap, tightening this up, and pulling our boat onto our trailer. If we can go ahead and just simply push it a little bit, that's gonna release a little tension on that pawl, allowing it to out of the way. And now, I can actually free spin this and spool it out. Can be very helpful to run your line down. Just make sure your hands are out of the way, so you don't get hit by that lever. So, our strap that comes included on here is gonna be a two inch by 15 foot strap. Now, this is gonna be made of a nylon or polyester material, much like a seatbelt. And what's great about these, they don't usually end up damaging our boats or interacting anything with our haul or anything, which is why a lot of people tend to go towards them when you are hauling boats. Now, talking about this strap too, you can see here on the inside, we could actually, if we need to, either change this out for a different material, or B, just go ahead and start replacing our strap if we start seeing a little bit of that wear over the years. Now, the one thing to that though, we do have these protective covers here on the outside. Now they kind of have that pro and cons, right The pro is protecting our gears here on the inside from any kind of water, debris. Making a little bit longer for us to having to do maintenance. But gonna make it a little harder to actually do maintenance when we actually get it on there. So, you can end up taking these plates off and get them out of the way. But it is one more step and can make it slightly an inconvenience. Well, now that we have a good idea of how it works and what it can do, let us see how to get it installed. To begin our installation, the first step is probably removing your older winch that you guys have in place. But fear not, hopefully, we can go ahead and retain that hardware that we are just adding this for the first time. Or our hardware's just a little too damaged, we need to pick up a little bit of hardware for ourselves as this actually doesn't come with our purchase. So, but three 3/8 of an inch bolts are going to do us just fine. We don't need too much length on them as we only really have our mounting plate and our first plate to go through. But of course, this is gonna be nice for us to have a little bit of extra thread just to make it not look so bad. Be my only thing to keep in mind. And to set this in place, we are gonna have our mounting plate here. Now, we are gonna be a little fixed on what we have here today. No side ones. Now, could you drill out these guys Yes, at my, at my regards though, I really wouldn't mess with our plate too bad as we do have that nice finish on there where you don't really wanna deteriorate it. Where I would actually put a little bit of your own drilling at home is your own frame here. And that way, you can go ahead and cut out to your own facing. However, I think most of us are gonna have an okay time cause usually, they are pretty universal. All we have to do though, set it in place. Make sure you have a washer on your boat and run it through to begin to hold it in place. We wanna start by just hand threading our nuts on. That way, they're not spinning around all loose. I like to just run them up a little bit. Can be helpful to have a 9/16 inch wrench on the other side, holding on the top. And then, of course, placing a finger on that bolt, so it doesn't wanna push itself up past our plate. Once we've got it pretty much all the way driven up, we're just gonna tighten it down with a little bit of a ratchet and socket action to make sure it's nice and secure. To get our handle installed, it's gonna be really straightforward. We just have to find that positioning of our shaft, make sure our handle is aligned, run it on, then begin to tighten up our nut. We'll just need a 3/4 inch socket or wrench and run it all the way in. Well, hopefully, you guys got a pretty good idea of how to get this installed. It really doesn't take too much time. The biggest thing for me though is matching up that bolt spacing, and that might just require a little bit of custom drilling. Really, really like how this guy works. So overall, that zinc plating is excellent. For me, it's definitely what you want on your boat trailer. That way, it is gonna be a little bit more resistant to that corrosion and that wetness that we're gonna have just be, being in that marine environment, especially those living near that saltwater. Honestly, though, this single speed rating is a little bit low. It is probably gonna be a little harder to us actually get this boat in this trailer, especially ours. I'd say this is right at the lowest rating I would want for our winch here today. We do have about a 2,400 pound boat. So, gonna be right in line with that half rating. Personally, if you're looking at for safety and ease of use, going to that 3/4 mark is gonna be very, very helpful of just getting our boat on here that much easier for ourself. And speaking about convenience, if you guys really, really want to, you could look at an electrical boat winch for yourself. Now, that's gonna take a little bit more of a, kind of a gumption on your installation, and B, we are gonna need that necessary electrical hookup. But highly recommend giving those guys a look here at etrailer.com if you guys are interested. But otherwise, I think that about does it for our look here today at the Dutton-Lainson single speed hand winch with the 1,200 pounds weight capacity rating. I'm Bobby. Thank you for watching..