I have no experience but here's my opinion:
of your '51 project truck.
I don't post pictures of my Jeeps online anymore, but if I can remember to do it - and I often don't, so you may have to remind me - I'll PM you one.
PTO winches look nice at car shows. They are also very useful for farming. For off road recovery they are difficult. They are tied to engine speed. You can't easily use the engine to help as you are winching because they are tied together, control is next to impossible. They work well in very simple recovery situations and not much else, like I said they look nice.
This truck won't be in a lot of "off-road recovery" situations; the maximum extent would be a simple bog-down in a washed-out service road. A lot of the usage will be closer to "farming" than anything else. That said, my initial sentiments mirror yours.
Back in the 80's a good friend and I went off roading in deep snow together a lot. He had a 58 cj5 with a lot of nice parts and a pto winch. I think it was a Ramsey, rated at 9,000#. We used it often, and it worked very well. As I recall his pto was on the transfer case which gave him four winch speeds. ( I can't remember if it worked in both high and low range, if it did that would have given eight speeds. ) Which at the time I thought was pretty darn handy. That winch really pulled.
I'm not sure about the Ramsey winches on the late 50's CJ's, but I know the earlier ones on the early 50's trucks - my truck is a 473, for reference - came off the overdrive/PTO port on the Dana 18, and the D18 transfer case has a High-Neutral-Low shifter for engagement...so it seems like there would only be the one winch speed available, and that would be "whatever RPM the engine is set at." I need to do some more research on this, though, because you may be right; I also know that there are some overdrive units that had a built-in PTO adapter, so you could run both the overdrive
and the PTO from the same port. I can't recall which version of the overdrive I have; it's in a box, and I need to dig out the box.
My first shop job, 1971? was a helper installing Tulsa PTO Winches on resource trucks. They were bulletproof. But only worked if the engine was running. Otherwise, I'd have to say I prefer them over electric winches. Kind of nice to let out the clutch and everything is engaged. Real nice to control winch speed with the accelerator. All the PTO winches we used were worm & roller. No brake required. Nothing to fail. Never overheat it.
We also installed the big 30plus ton winches on oil field trucks.
Nothing says old school more than a PTO winch.
Back then the winch was supplied without power. You added a PTO drive or a hydrallic drive or an electric drive as a separate item. Only a few came as complete electric packages. Like the Tulsa 5E.
If I'm not mistaken, some of the early CJ's came with a throttle setting on the dash specifically to help control PTO speed; I'll have to look into that, as well. I do like the old-school appeal, and this particular truck is as much of a working, daily-driven truck as it is a restoration - and believe me, it needs a LOT of restoration - and as I said, it's not going to be placed into a lot of severe off-road situations; that's just not what it's being built to do. The end goal is for it to be a work truck for my wife's business (she's a beekeeper) that we can use as a vehicle
and a form of advertising; a 50's style work-truck with lettered doors and a hand-painted logo and a cute girl driving it is a hell of a way to get some attention. It'll need a bit more power under the hood to be able to go more than 55MPH, so I know there's an eventual engine swap in the works, but most of the rest of it - i.e. whether or not we add a winch to it - is up in the air and not critical to function. Sure, I want whatever we do to work and be useful, but since it's not an off-road toy the options for that kind of stuff open up a bit. It's all conjecture for now, but since some of these parts can be hard to find, I'm trying to get my ducks in a row at the beginning of the project, so I can snap up deals when I find them...even if I'm not up to that point in the build, yet.
