I do wonder what is actually failing on a lot on these HF winches. If I had to guess it would be the solenoid or maybe the grease frying and not doing its job. I would imagine a short break in and then grease change and spare solenoid might give some long life for a cheap price.
The remote could probably be hot-wired pretty easy in the field, not that one would want to, but $250 +extras vs $500+ might be a bigger deal for some people. Especially on a budget build of some sort.
For my long term off-roading stuff $500 to be sure +$150 for new line, isn't a massive deal (I bought the M8000 10 years ago for under $500 so I don't think about it anymore). The truck, where I'm kind of planning a side build for a long distance trip hopefully in the next 1 or 2 years and the $800 vs up to $3k, makes a big deal with some of the other extras I would like to get done before heading out. At this point I'm going to design a bumper to hopefully accept any of the winches I'm looking at and worst case scenario, I run my Badlands 12,000lb winch.
And like I said earlier, I haven't had any trouble from the HF Badlands winches and I would love to hear some failure stories, especially those that broke the winches down and found the problem. In any case, I really don't prefer the Badlands winches and was planning to just put this one on my trailer, but I simply have not had any issue with my 1 Badlands winch, so I can't bad mouth it, nor have I used it hard.
The remote could probably be hot-wired pretty easy in the field, not that one would want to, but $250 +extras vs $500+ might be a bigger deal for some people. Especially on a budget build of some sort.
For my long term off-roading stuff $500 to be sure +$150 for new line, isn't a massive deal (I bought the M8000 10 years ago for under $500 so I don't think about it anymore). The truck, where I'm kind of planning a side build for a long distance trip hopefully in the next 1 or 2 years and the $800 vs up to $3k, makes a big deal with some of the other extras I would like to get done before heading out. At this point I'm going to design a bumper to hopefully accept any of the winches I'm looking at and worst case scenario, I run my Badlands 12,000lb winch.
And like I said earlier, I haven't had any trouble from the HF Badlands winches and I would love to hear some failure stories, especially those that broke the winches down and found the problem. In any case, I really don't prefer the Badlands winches and was planning to just put this one on my trailer, but I simply have not had any issue with my 1 Badlands winch, so I can't bad mouth it, nor have I used it hard.