Home Made Winch Cradle for HZJ105 Landcruiser

I hope this is useful to someone having a go at this, any luck they may come up with something better!
If nothing else perhaps someone may learn from my mistakes

Thanks the guys at the LCOOL.org forum for the help…

This bullbar was installed on the bar when I bought the cruiser, so for the moment I’m stuck with it even though it’s not a winch capable bar. No room for a roller fairlead either, without chopping too much out of the bar. So I needed a winch cradle, it had to be strong as, and capable of restraining all the forces involved in a normal winch on it’s own, independent of the bar or bumper.

This was fun to make, and ended up costing about $70. The Warn fairlead was an extra $100, and the hooks $30.

The first design, based on a long 10mm plate utilizing the three bolts into the chassis each side. Working in a flat plane under the chassis rails turned out to be less than ideal, it affected the approach angle a little, but with my particular bar the rope would also have to travel upwards about 30 degrees to the fairlead.

Here's 2 pics of the original, now discarded design:

In the picture above, note the 6mm spacer added to the 10mm plate above the hooks, to make a level plane with the bullbar bracket. An advantage to this was I ended up with 16mm where the recovery hooks attach. This may or may not be required on another vehicle with another bar.

So the solution seemed to be to raise the platform 90mm, but this meant the winch would be very close to the air conditioner condenser, and also the radiator support would be a problem. So up 90mm and forward 80mm seemed perfect.
So here is the finished design. The bed is 10mm plate, 50 x 50 x 5mm angle for bracing, 6mm for the fairlead face. It is uber heavy, but uber strong, better engineering and a good workshop, especially the ability to fold sheet, could make it much lighter with 6mm plate I think. This ended up being a whopping 21.5kgs, not a problem for my car but still should be way lighter ideally.

Synthetic rope would be the go I reckon, but the budgets allocated on other stuff at the moment, food and stuff…

Held with three 50mm M12 1.25 bolts each side, and when fitted will also carry the 2 x 10,000lb recovery hooks. The fairlead is a Warn cast iron hawse type for wire rope, and the bullbar face is sandwiched between the support and the fairlead. Hopefully the cradle will bear all the forces involved.

When fitting the cradle, the bottom of the little support in front of the radiator needed trimming, an old bumper attachment I think, just used a dremel cutoff tool. The end result has the winch sitting about 1cm in front of the radiator support beam.

Solenoid pack is tucked inside the bar, with the operation socket on the outside. In hindsight the solenoids are not very accessible if they cark it in the bush, any problems I’ll replace them with a modern type pack.

Finished...