TowSmart Trailer Winch - Single Speed - Ratcheting - 20' Strap - 1,500 lbs

Video Transcript for TowSmart Ratcheting Trailer Winch Review and Installation

Randy: Hey, guys. Randy here at etrailer.com. Today we're going to be taking a look at a TowSmart Winch.Now, this is going to be designed for a lot of different situations, but most often you'll see them on the front of jon boats, fishing boats, smaller boats like that. It has a 2" wide strap and a 1500 pound capacity. Now, we don't need to ensure that our boat weighs less than 1500 pounds. We're not trying to hold the whole boat, we're just keeping it pulled forward against our bow anchor here.

Now, the winch itself can also be mounted on trailers or you can mount it in the bed of your truck if you want to, to help crank in an ATV or roll something up onto the trailer that's a little bit heavier and hard to push.Here you can see a closer look at the winch. It's a nice 2" wide strap. Very nice material. Comes up to the heavy-duty steel hook. Does have the keeper on there, and you can see the throat is nice and wide.

So even if your connection point up here's a little bit thicker, shouldn't have a problem getting around it. Got a nice long handle. It's going to be 7" from the center of the bolt here to the center of the handle. Allows us to get plenty of torque put on there. And I like the handle.

It's a little bit smaller than what we see on them, but you can see it's got a nice taper. So even if your hands are wet, you'll be able to hold on to it well, and it's got a nice rough texture. Should be something easy to get a hold of without your hands slipping off like we run into with some of them.It will ratchet in both directions. So we release this here. That's in our full open.

We can get it in the ratchet position as it's backing out, so if we want to stop at a point, we can do that. And then flipping the lever the other way, of course, that's going to give us our engagement or pull it down into whatever, pull whatever you want up and on.Overall, it has a nice clear zinc finish on it, so in marine applications, we're not going to have to worry about rust and corrosion too much. Does a good job. The taper here helps to ensure that our strap gets fed on there properly. The gear is a nice solid one-piece gear here and I like the way the ratchet mechanism works. Overall, I think it does a great job.Now, to begin your installation, we're going to place the handle over on what would be the driver's side of the trailer. We want our release lever to be facing forward. That'll have our hook facing rearward. And we want to place it down on our bracket here. You want to be sure you're using at least a grade 5 3/8" hardware. That's what's recommended for the hole that we're going to place it in. You can see the mounting options are pretty diverse here. We've got the triple section here. You've got the smaller hole if you're using the narrower mounts, or we're using just the traditional, the one here, and then this one's elongated, because sometimes these holes can be a little bit closer, a little bit further away.So our bolt's going to come down and through here, down and through there. Same thing on the front side here in that elongated hole. Once those are through, we'll take . A flat washer will be optional, but also a nylon lock nut. We're going to place that on the bottom. Do that in both of our locations and we'll get them snugged down and then we'll torque them to specification. And once those bolts are torqued down properly, just take our hook, connect it on, begin to take up the excess.Now, the first time you install this, you're putting this strap on and you need to crank it for a while to tighten that up. You will see that's kind of sliding there. We want to get that tension built up in there. We want to take any slack that might be in there out. If not, our boat still could be likely to move rearward on us, so just continue until you feel a good force pulling down and forward. That's nice and solid there now, not any slack or any looseness that we have to worry about. We won't have to worry about our boat going anywhere.So overall, when it comes to this type of winch, they're all pretty basic. I like this one mainly because of the handle. I really like that, as opposed to just a straight handle or one that's more slick. Overall, I think if you need a new winch for the front of your boat or trailer, I think this would be a good option.