Barricade Replacement Synthetic Rope for Barricade 12,000 lb. Winch - Orange

Before Picture: 

1. Always wear gloves when working with your winch/winch cable.  First disengage your winch clutch using the lever.  Then unwind your old winch cable all the way to the end. 

2. You may need extra room to work with, so I recommend you partially or fully remove your winch solenoid.  For my winch that required 5mm, and 6mm Allen wrenches to remove the bolts on both sides of the solenoid box.  Note:  For many other winches (Including Barricade), you simply need a screwdriver to loosen the solenoid mount bracket. 

3. At the very end of the cable there will be a bolt holding your cable to the drum.  Use a 5mm Allen wrench to unscrew and remove this bolt.

4. If switching from steel cable to the synthetic rope you have a few options for the fairlead.  Most people will just choose to go with a Hawse fairlead.  However, you can opt to still use a roller fairlead if you would prefer.  But the important part is that you will need to replace the rollers if your old ones were ever used with steel cable.  Even 1 use with cable is enough to scratch up the rollers, and even very minor scuffs (like the ones shown right) in the rollers can damage your new synthetic rope.  To remove the rollers, use a snap ring removal tool. 

5. Then feed in your new synthetic winch rope through the fairlead and around the bottom side of the drum as shown (right).  Use the bolt removed in step 3 to attach your new rope as shown (right).

6. Next, crank up your Jeep, connect your winch remote and re-engage the winch clutch.  Using gloves to hold the rope tight, begin to wind the rope in.  Caution:  Be very careful not to get your hand too close to the fairlead while winching.  Your hand could get caught and severely injured. 

7. Wind in the rope initially until you have 1 complete wrap all the way down the drum as shown (right). 

8. After that initial wrap, you have 2 options.  Option 1: You can attach your hook to a tree or something and winch you Jeep up a slight hill.  In this case you would slowly wrap the rope left and right across the drum in a nice neat wrap, the same way you would have done with the steel cable.  Use a large wrench to push the rope left and right to keep it winding evenly.  This is the most common method, however sometimes this can lead to the rope “submarining” (getting pulled under the top layer and pinched between the layers) while winching.  See step 9 for option 2. 

9. My recommendation- Option 2:  No weight required, just pull the rope tight.  After step 7 feed the rope side to side in a criss cross pattern.  The rope will come out looking messy as shown (right), but it is far less likely to “submarine” while winching.

10. When you get to the last few feet of rope, stop winching.  Attach your hook to the end of the rope as shown (right), and hook it to your desired location.  Then finish winching in the rope until it’s tight enough not to bounce around.

After Picture: