Bulldog Winch Powersports Series ATV Winch - Synthetic Rope - Hawse Fairlead - 2,500 lbs

Video Transcript for Bulldog Winch Powersports Series ATV Winch Installation - 2014 Polaris Sportsman

Hey everyone. Shane here with hr.com. Today I have a 2014 Polaris sportsman, 570 ATV. I'm going to walk through how to install the bulldog 2,500 pound winch and the bulldog custom installation bracket. Hanging a winch onto your ATV is going to give you a lot of different options. Maybe you like to go out four-wheeling with your friends with your friends and you found yourself stuck and you're depending on somebody else to get you out.

Having a winch on there is gonna allow you to take your winch strap, run it around a tree be able to pull yourself out or maybe you can pull one of your friends out. Maybe you use Rover around your farm and you've come across big logs in some of your trails. And you can't really move them by hand again adding winch on like this, you can wrap around the tree you can get it out of your path to make it a lot easier. So what our winch looks like when it's installed you can see it fits very nicely on the front of our ATV. This particular winch is going to have a three-stage planetary gear in it.

And when you compare that to like a wormhole gear Wormhole gear is just a single gear and it only goes one speed. Having a three-stage planetary gear allows your drum to move much faster. So whatever you're moving, maybe you're moving a tree or again, pulling yourself out you're gonna be able to move a little bit quicker. It's going to have an auto break in it. So let's say we're on a steep Hill.

We have our cable wrapped around a tree and obviously our vehicles a neutral. We don't want our vehicle to start backing up on us. So it's going to have an auto break in it that once we have that connected it's not going to allow the vehicle to move any farther. The watch itself is going to be fully in case. So the casing around it is not going to allow any water or anything to get inside and do any damage to any gears.

It's going to have an auto release or they say a free school. And it's a little lever over here on the side or a little knob on the side which we'll show you here in a little bit and allows you to pull the wire, pull the cable out freely. So for wanting to wrap it around something we can just grab onto it, pull it out get it wrapped around whatever we have lock it back into place and ready to go. It's going to come with the Hoss Fairlead it's going to have rounded edges because this particular winch is going to come with a synthetic rope. When you compare the synthetic rope to like the wired ones, the wire ones tend to rust over time. They splinter and even wearing gloves. They'll splinters can sometimes get through those gloves and they tear up your hands. Even if those wire ones get kinked they don't swell up anymore. We don't have to worry about that with the synthetic rope that synthetic rope is going to be 50 foot long. So we're going to have plenty of length to get out pull it out, get it around a tree, get it around, you know whatever we may be working with. It's also going to come with the hook and the strap. So we don't have to actually grab on to the synthetic rope itself. We can grab it right here on the strap to pull it out. This is going to be our knob for our free spool. All we're going to do is we're going to turn it. And that allows us again, to pull out our synthetic rope without having to hit our button. Once we get out to where we want lock it back in place and it locks the rope. It's also going to come with a switch, the switch. You can use it in two different ways. You use it. How we have it here where we have it mounted to the handlebars. It's going to come with the handlebar Mount or it's going to have an eight foot cable. Once it's connected to the solenoid, you can take it and tuck it in somewhere and you can use it while you're standing out away from the bike. It's really going to be up to you and how you want to use it. It is going to be a momentary in and out switch. Now this particular kit does have to be wired to an ignition source, which we have it wired directly to one of the wires coming off our ignition here so that it only comes on when our key is in the on position. Now it is recommended. Anytime you're winching something, you have your line out have a line break on it. Even though this is a synthetic rope, we still don't want. If that happens to break, we don't want any of that rope coming back and hitting us And you can see, as soon as I load up the switch, it's got again, the auto brake in it. It's not going to let us roll anywhere. Now, as far as our bracket that's mounting it to our vehicle. This is a custom bracket. It's also by bulldog. It doesn't come with a winch. However, you can find it here, at E Trailer. just by checking the fit guide for the bike that you have. The bracket itself as I mentioned is going to be custom fit. So we're not going to have to drill any holes or anything like that. It's going to Mount directly to factory holes that are already in the frame. As far as the installation process the winch and the bracket. If you decided to go with the bracket is going to come with all the necessary hardware to get them installed. The only trimming we had to do, and it was for this particular bike is this small panel right here was still on there. So we had to cut it out in order to install the winch. Other than that, it's pretty simple and straightforward. And wiring is very simple and straightforward. Now we've gone over some of the features. Let's walk through how to get it installed to start our installation. We need to remove this lower panel. If you have a guard, the way this one is set up this guard going to have to come off too. Well, two bolts up here, and then two down here we're going to use a half inch socket wrench or two sockets to remove thatOkay, we'll set this aside. Then we need to remove this bracket here. Nine millimeter socket. We'll remove it. And we're going to take a T 27 star bit. And we're gonna remove. You're going to have one bolt here. And one on the opposite side, we need to remove both of those. Take this. And we're going to pop this off and set it aside. Now, before we install this on the bracket, we need to make sure we cut our loop off. First. We're going to cut this zip tie We'll just unwind this one time leave a little bit hanging out. Then we can install it onto our bracket. You're going to have a bracket that looks like this. You'll notice that it's angled. We want this angle kind of see how it's facing down. We want that facing down. We're going to take this bracket, line it up there. We're going to slide our winch in like this. This bracket is gonna mount just like that. In your kit with your winch, you're going to get pack of bolts. We're going to use four of the longer ones. You're going to put on a lock washer And then a flat washer The winch is going to have threaded holes. We'll get one in each corner of our bracket. We'll take a half inch socket. We'll tighten them down. Or a wrench. Now we're gonna install our fair lead. I'm finding that the bolts are not quite sitting in there and it could be just paint. What I don't want to do is I don't want to strip out the bolts. So I'm going to take a drill bit. I'm just going to clean the holes out just a little bit. That's what you want to do. Now it's up to you. You can spray that whole. You take that paint off. I have a paint marker. So I'm just going to cover up that bare metal and help resist any rust or anything later on. Now we're going to take our fairlead. We're going to run our rope through it. We're going to line up with the holes we're gonna take our bolt. Grab it through each one of the holes And then on the under side we're going to put a flat washer a lock washer and nut on each one. Now we're going to use an 11/16 socket. 16 socket and a number eight Allen head or Allen wrench. And we're going to tighten those down. Next we're going to take our winch setup and we're going to get it mounted to our bike. On your bike there's a frame mount here. Your going to see two holes on each side. We're going to line these brackets up with those two holes. in your kit with the bracket you're going to have a couple of short bolts. You have to use these to mount the bracket. You're going to have hardware that comes with your winch. I suggest putting on a flat washer and a lock washer from the winch pack before you mount, or when you mount this to the actual bike. In the instructions they don't show the lock washer and flat washer on there. And we'll take a half inch socket. We'll tighten those down. Next we need to find a place to Mount our solenoid. They really want this mounted up high out of the elements. The problem is there's a compartment here. You want to mount it inside. You have open contact. So if you're throwing, you know straps or anything like that in there, they hit that. You could have an issue. The centerpiece underneath of this comes out to get to the radiator fluid. There's not really a whole lot of room in there. One thing you could do possibilities. You could buy a junction box, Mount that the junction box inside of this compartment here and then Mount this inside of it. It's going to take a lot of extra work getting all your wires ran up there. All of that. So what I think I'm going to do is this panel right here on the side, we're gonna remove it. Our frame rail went straight down, remove this panel. We're in mount a solenoid right to it. Our radiator is in a block anything for men that there this panel is going to block anything, coming from our wheels, from hitting it. We're gonna take our star bit. We're going to move this bolt here. should be a pushpin fastener on this backside but it doesn't look like they had one on there. Let's take this slide it out of the way. And then this is our frame rail I was talking about since our battery is right here it's going to make it easy to wrap everything up and away from anything hot or moving. So I think what want to do is I'm gonna Mount my solenoid right here. It'll be behind the panel. As I mentioned, it'll be behind the radiator. All my connections here will be protected. And then again, we have our front panel. We still need to put on. So we'll have plenty of coverage for it now we need to do is we need to drill holes into the bracket so we can get our hardware mounted. Now with our solenoid mounted. All I did was use some cell tappers. So a little bit of an odd angle to get a drill bit in there to drill holes. Again, I just use cell tappers. I use an extension on the drill and just went straight down on it so you to hold it in there pretty well. Next, I'm going to go ahead and get my switch wire routed down to my solenoid. I think I'm gonna Mount it right here on my handlebars. It does come with a handlebar bracket. I'm going to get these mounted. I'm going to run them back behind this panel down underneath and over my solenoid. And then we'll go from there. You're going to get two sets of wires two red and two blacks. One of the sets of black and red are going to be short. And the other set are going to be long depending on the winch you have. It's going to depend on whether you use the short ones from the winch to the solenoid or the long ones, our particular winch. We're going to be using the short ones. You're going to have boots that come in your kit. They're a little rubber boots. You're going to slide them right over your right over the ends of the cables. We're going, gonna go ahead and run these from our winch over to where we mounted our solenoid. Before I get that completely tight I'm going to get this routed over. How I'm routing It is where this bracket ties into the frame. There's a, there's a gap in there. I'm going to run it right straight through. Use a 10 millimeter socket. Once you get your wires routed to tighten them down you want to take that boot and you want to slide it over the top of your connectors. You're going, gonna notice on your solenoid. There's a black and green wire, but also a blue wire going into a negative post, the negative post and positive post on that end are they cables that are going over the connections that are going to go to the battery the opposite side, the two coming from the winch. So our wires that we just ran over you need to route them and connect them to these two posts. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to run right underneath here and here they'll stay away from my radiator. There's a hole in my frame right there. I can run a zip tie around and it'll hold it up tight, right there. This is going to be my longer positive cable. That's going to go to my battery. This is how I mounted my switch. Again. It's going to come with the bracket. Just kind of determine where you want to put it and then tighten everything down. The cable is coming off That I routed, I took these two panels apart. It's just got three screws, at least this one does you have one in the front here, and then two here and then one here, and this will pop off. And you pretty much got a straight line straight down through there, right over to where the solenoid and battery are. You're going to have a red wire in this bundle. It needs to be connected to an ignition switch. We want to connect it to a wire that only is on when the power is on or when the keys in the on position. I determined that it's this red one with this black Stripe. You'll notice there's two of them. I tested all four of these and determined. This is the one I'm going to be using. I'll go ahead and test it again to show you. You can see we have no power. The key's in the on position. So that's the wire we want to tap into now. I am not going to cut the wire and splice this in what I'm going to use a quick splice connector. These do not come in your kit but you can pretty much find these anywhere you get that put back together there. And then get this put back on. Throw a zip tie on there. Keep it looking as factory as possible. The green and black wire coming from our switch. We're going to connect them to the green and black wires on our solenoid. What I'm going to do is once I connect them I'm going to go ahead and tape them up to make sure they stay connected. If you really want it to, you can cut these off and hardwire them, but if you ever have any problem with the solenoid or the switch you'd have to cut the wire and then re splice it. So it's really going to be up to you. Last thing we need to do is we needed to connect our power and ground from our solenoid to our battery. Once we get that connected, we'll test it all out make sure everything is working correctly. And then we can start putting everything back together. Now that we've got everything connected to our battery we'll go ahead and test it out. Turn our key on. Now that we know it's working correctly we can go ahead and start bundling up our wire getting our front panel back on keep in mind on this front panel we are going to have to trim a little bit. Yours may not. We're going to have to cut out this lower panel for our winch fairlead and our cable. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut it right along that line. I think I'm going to cut it from in here. You can kind of see where it has that lip there. Just going to follow that line, cut this out and then we can go from there. If we have to trim out anymore I'm just going to use a rotary tool with a cutting blade to get that done. Now that we've got everything put back on need to put our hook onto our ring I'm going to bend the Cotter pin and slide that pin out. I'm gonna reinstall it just like that. And of course, slide on our pull strap. We're ready to go. That's going to do it for a look at and installation on the bulldog 2,500 pound Lynch and custom installation bracket on a 2014, Polaris sportsman, 570 ATV..