Automotive winch Sprut-9000

The production of the Sprut-9000 automobile winch began in January 2005. The winch has established itself as a reliable, inexpensive alternative to Western analogues. During production, a number of design changes were made that made it possible to significantly improve the characteristics. Fans of extreme and off-road driving, hunters and fishermen appreciated the significant differences between the new model and its predecessor Sprut-8000. According to price criteria, SPRUT has an incredibly high price-quality ratio.The winch has passed the tests with honor in such famous competitions as the international trophy raid “Golden Barrel - Ladoga” and “Tver Land 2005”.The winch is supplied complete with a bracket. Currently on sale are brackets for installing the Sprut winch on vehicles of the UAZ-3151, UAZ-452, UAZ-3160, UAZ Hunter, UAZ Patriot, Niva, Gazelle and Sadko. It is practically possible to develop a bracket and install a winch on any SUV, both domestic and imported.

The electromechanical winch SPRUT, powered by an on-board battery and generator, is designed to pull out a stuck car and overcome obstacles.

Winch SPRUT-9000 provides electromechanical winding (dispensing) of the cable at 1st speed, as well as accelerated manual release of the cable.

Control is carried out by the gear shift knob and remote control remote control.

Winches are installed on cars of the UAZ, Niva, Gazelle families on a special bracket that ensures quick removal of the winch. For UAZ-3151 (469B) and UAZ-452 vehicles, both front and rear brackets are provided.

The winch is successfully used on tow trucks, which indicates a large reserve of power and service life of the product.

The winch is designed for operation at temperatures environment from -40 to +45 C.

The winch kit includes:

• winch assembly with mounting kit;
• vehicle mounting bracket with mounting kit;
• remote control;
• connection cable to the car battery.

It can be equipped with a synthetic cable with a diameter of 14 mm with a breaking force of 3000 kgf. The drum holds 10-12 meters (recommended for owners of NIVA vehicles in order to significantly reduce the weight of the winch)

The buyer of the SPRUT winch receives complete set, which will allow you to install it and connect it to the car’s electrical wiring yourself in a garage. This does not require any special equipment or devices. Models UAZ-452 and UAZ-3160 require modification standard bumper and reinstallation state number car onto a folding bracket attached to the winch itself.

After a long conversation with Chinese products and their Western prototypes, the Octopus winch may seem like an alien artifact

"Octopus Sport 9000" is a fairly fast winch with powerful motor, and our specimen also has an elongated drum. Traction, according to established tradition, is declared in pounds (9,000 pounds is 4 tons). With a general external similarity and a classic layout of components inside, the Octopus is completely unlike any of its competitors.

Solenoid. Burnt contacts can be easily replaced with
homemade from a standard copper busbar

INSIDE

The classic winch design, dating back to the 1950s, is based on cast aluminum body parts. And not only do these inexpensive alloys poorly resist ordinary corrosion and are also poorly painted, but also when in contact with a steel motor and gearbox, they inevitably oxidize galvanically under the influence of electrocorrosion. We will not find aluminum in the Sprut (except perhaps for the engine cover). The backbone of the structure consists of steel plates. This approach changes a lot. The problem with soured fastening bolts disappears, the housing cannot be damaged by a clogged cable, and the fairlead can be secured directly to the winch. And in general, the design turns out to be more rigid and much less demanding on the strength of the installation site.

The second surprise of Sprut is polymers. The gearbox cover, switch, and drum cuffs are made of plastic. Of course, the plastic lid and handle are inferior in strength to alloys, but they are superior in corrosion resistance and price.

Unwinding mechanism. The eccentric handle moves the pusher,
which moves the fourth stage sun gear, disengaging it

It is impossible not to pay attention to the special cable sealing. The cable is braided and sealed with a plastic lock. This solution is more reliable than the standard and more technologically advanced pressing with an aluminum clip. The hook is one-piece and woven into the cable. This is not always convenient and not very rational - for an experienced jeeper, the hook will survive more than one cable. It’s not for nothing that the removable hook is a classic of the genre. However, we must admit that this approach is used not only by the creators of Octopus.

The kit includes a cast iron hawse, which is more practical than the more common roller hawse. It is immediately installed on the winch.

ACCESSORIES

Wires, terminals, solenoid and remote control domestic production, and they reek of some kind of Sovietness, both in the bad and in the good sense of the word. That is, on the one hand, it is rude and unaesthetic, and on the other hand, it is cheap, reliable and practical. Strong and indestructible! The simplicity of the solutions is emphasized by black “welding” wires with a cross-section of 25 mm2, black rubber caps on the contacts for connecting to the generator, a chopped plastic remote control with a button for the window lifter, a thick wire and a heavy connector.

Gearbox. Three of the four stages are located inside the drum.
Gears operate on its inner toothed surface,
forming a particularly compact block

SOLENOID

This is new. Previously, classic imported “barrels” were used. But now Sprut has produced its own monoblock. Moreover, this is a candy bar in the full sense of the word! The case where a winch manufacturer uses its own rather than a standard solenoid can be called unique. Accordingly, it is manufactured according to the requirements specific model. The remote control connector is located directly on the housing, that is, the solenoid is already a control box, in which the solenoid is usually located. It can be easily disassembled and allows for repairs, as they say, on the knee. If the contacts burn out, which sooner or later happens with any solenoids, the burnt-out parts can easily be replaced with homemade ones from a standard copper busbar. By the way, there is a sticker on the solenoid with a wiring diagram. Simple and convenient! For some reason, none of the competitors have figured this out yet, and connecting a spare, especially a non-original solenoid, often causes difficulty.

The electric motor is made from a starter with a modified brush connection diagram
and stator windings, thanks to which it can rotate in any direction

FREE UNWINDING

The winch uses an original free unwinding mechanism. The unwinding handle rotates 360 degrees. A spring lock stops it in two opposite positions: “on” and “off”. It rotates easily, regardless of the position of the gears in the gearbox. There is no jamming, which is traditional for almost all winches, when turning on or off. Sometimes you get the feeling that the handle has no effect on the gearbox and turns on its own. However, the drum is still released, and it rotates very easily. Few winches can boast such easy unwinding.

DRUM

The sizes are impressive! The drum is very large, both in diameter and in length. The cable is securely fastened inside the drum, at the ends of which plastic clips are installed. Huge full-fledged oil seals are hidden in them. They grip the outside of the powerful plastic drum bearings protruding from the body, into which the axle fits. But that's not all! There is another oil seal on the motor side. As a result, the structure becomes completely impregnable to water and dirt.

GEARBOX

The appearance did not deceive - the gearbox also turned out to be unique. The part of the winch that is usually a gearbox is just a fourth stage and a free-rewind handle mechanism. The gearbox has four stages (not a common occurrence, usually there are three). At the same time, the three stages are located very ingeniously - inside the drum! And their crown gear is the drum itself.

To imagine how the work of the gear stages in a rotating drum affects the transmitted torque, you need to have incredible spatial imagination.

The first three steps are equivalent, and the first two are completely identical. This creates potential for tuning. By lengthening the shaft, you can remove one or even two stages! In the first case, we will get a very high-speed sports winch for a light SUV, in the second it will be super-fast, but not for cars, but, say, for pulling a cable or a wakeboard.

The obvious disadvantage of the four-stage design is the large friction losses. The total gear ratio is 270. Such gearboxes usually correspond to winches of the 12500 series (5.5 tons), but the Sprut drum has a significantly larger diameter, which compensates for the excessive reduction. Thanks to this drum diameter, the cable bends less, which significantly extends the service life of the latter.

BRAKE

Spring brake. It's not a unique design, but it's larger than the competition and likely offers better durability.

MOTOR

The winch motor is made from a starter. During the adaptation process, necessary changes were made to it. The shaft was cut and remade for a special adapter; to start the engine in two directions, the electrical part was modified (a gap must be made between the brushes and the stator windings). As a result, two more contacts are added to the standard “plus” for the starter. Switching all three contacts through solenoids according to a certain scheme allows you to change the direction of rotation. The declared power of 3.5 kW is approximately 5 liters.  With. Quite modest. Moreover, in terms of physical parameters, dimensions of the armature and winding, the motor is significantly larger than those of its competitors. From a maintenance point of view, the most difficult task will probably be installing the brushes. But spare parts for this former starter can be bought anywhere.

RESULTS

“Sprut” turned out to be a good-quality and reliable winch with a high resource potential and will be of interest primarily to professional tow truck operators. A minimum of attention is paid to the design, everything is subordinated to manufacturability and functionality.

Report on the operation of the Octopus 9000 24V electric winch produced in Ulyanovsk on a tow truck.

After more than three years daily use on a tow truck, the product of Ulyanovsk craftsmen migrated to less loaded conditions, or rather from a tow truck with a lifting capacity of 5 tons to a tow truck with a lifting capacity of 3 tons.

Since the beginning of October 2014 to October 2017, with breaks in total about 2 months for the time that truck was undergoing repairs and maintenance, the electric winch required attention three times:

2015, the spring of the brake mechanism broke - downtime for special equipment was 3 days (the brake mechanism was completely replaced under warranty, the electric winch had to be transported to Ulyanovsk);

2015, the wire to the winch control panel could not withstand negative temperatures (at -30, the insulation of the wire collapsed at the bend, the wire shorted and the electric motor switched to the “cable winding” mode). Miraculously, we managed to avoid damage to the car and destruction of the electric winch.

2017 The brake mechanism stopped performing its functional duties. The electric winch stopped braking when winding stopped.

Photo of the Sprut9000 electric winch dismantled from a tow truck for maintenance and repair.

Advantages:

Reliable metal body construction;

Technical support;

Availability of spare parts. The manufacturer sends the components by transport company.

I would definitely like to note the low current consumption. The car is equipped with 2 batteries with a capacity of 140 Ah. We appreciated this advantage, as always, at the most unexpected moment. An application was received to evacuate a car 150 km from the city. Upon arrival, important details were revealed that the customer, in a state of passion, kept silent. It turns out that the car not only flew off the road, but tumbled into a dilapidated abandoned house, overcoming a strip foundation rising half a meter, thereby finding itself in a concrete trap. The tired look of the miraculously saved people and the desire to earn money, with the phrase about an unlimited limit on payment for tow truck services approved by the insurance company, forced us to take on the complex application. The situation was further complicated by the fact that all this happened at the bottom of the slope and melted spring waters fenced off the destroyed house with a car inside from the road with a huge puddle, preventing special equipment from getting closer than 15 meters to the location of the car. The task of everyday life is not an easy one, and even the traffic police crew, who have already seen almost everything, arrived to registration of road accidents, stayed to watch what was happening until the end. The house in this area was single, abandoned, dilapidated and, as usual, built with your own hands without observing construction norms and rules. The strip foundation, 1 m high and 0.4 m wide, was buried 0.5 meters and was made without reinforcement. This fact and the really high traction force of the Sprut winch made it possible to cope with this task with a conventional tow truck without tractors and cranes. The strip foundation was dug, tied with a cable, and giant pieces of the cracked foundation were literally torn out of the ground and pulled away using an electric winch. Some fragments were huge and had to be moved quite a considerable distance to clear the way for the mangled car. It was the low current consumption of the electric winch that gave the feeling of limitless battery capacity and allowed us to concentrate on work. The work was completed, the traction force of the electric winch and the battery capacity were sufficient.

Flaws:

Low quality of spare parts. As always received spare part had to be modified and adjusted, which is unacceptable in modern conditions. Received from the manufacturer, the brake mechanism turned out to have a deformed internal bushing bore, for this reason the shaft did not fit into the hole. When disassembling the brake mechanism, it is clearly visible that this mechanism tried to install (most likely on the assembly line of new electric winches), using a barbaric method of applying shock loads, thereby deforming the internal mounting hole bushings. After unsuccessful installation attempts on the assembly line, the brake mechanism was sent to spare parts. I had to spend time determining the cause, disassembling and assembling one of the two mechanisms (old and new). We contacted the manufacturer regarding this fact and are awaiting a response.

Photo of the brake mechanisms of the Octopus electric winch in disassembled form (new on the left).

Photo of the shaft and bushing of the brake mechanism of the Sprut electric winch

Photo of the bushing of the new brake mechanism with a damaged internal hole in the brake mechanism of the Sprut electric winch

The nut on the rod holding the gearbox and the electric motor was unscrewed, on the electric motor side, it was discovered only when SPRUT 9000 was replaced with SPRUT 12000. At the same time, the metal body of the electric winch not only withstood it, but did not even deform. There are several Chinese working electric winches in the warehouse with damaged alloy housings; under similar circumstances, the attachment points are destroyed and the electric winch requires replacement.

It should be noted that the electric winch was reliably protected from precipitation during all three years of operation and did not plunge into puddles and mud as in off-road conditions; due to this fact, we do not draw any conclusions about the tightness. Also, for 3 years of daily use it has not been serviced.

Having appreciated the Ulyanovsk products (this is already the 3rd electric winch), a Sprut 12000 24V winch was purchased and installed on a tow truck with a lifting capacity of 5 tons.

First impressions of the Sprut 12000 24V electric winch in comparison with the Sprut 9000 24V electric winch:

Photo of electric winches Sprut9000 and Sprut 12000 (Sprut 9000 at the top).

The electric winch Sprut 12000 is heavier and larger in size, the drum is much larger.

The cable winding speed of the Sprut 12000 is significantly lower compared to the Sprut 9000.

For 3 years, the limit of traction force could not be determined for the Sprut 9000, the Sprut 12000 tightens loaders weighing 5 tons without using a roller, but at the same time it is felt that the winch is loaded.

The Sprut 12000 has significantly more noise during operation in the gearbox area (most likely due to the large gear ratio).

The control panel connection connector has been changed; the connection is much more convenient and reliable for the Sprut 12000.

The control unit of the Octopus 12000 is smaller in size; judging by the dimensions, there is 1 solenoid (not checked). The Sprut 9000 control unit has 2 solenoids to distribute the load. We will monitor the reliability of this block.

The wire to the control panel is made of a flexible cable that allows operation at temperatures below - 30 degrees. Octopus 9000 was supplied from the factory with a wire designed for operation at positive temperatures.

Photo of the Sprut 12000 winch installed on a tow truck.

We have nothing to do with the manufacturer and tried to convey as fully as possible our impressions and experience of operating an electric winch on a tow truck. We apologize for the quality of the photo. Thank you for your attention.