Keeper KW95122-1 12V DC Heavy Duty Winch with Wireless Control - 9500 lbs. Capacity

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Price: $427.61    

Product Feature

• 5.5 horse power series wound 12 Volt DC motor
• Handheld pendant switch attached to 15 foot lead with high density LED work light and wireless winch control
• Power in and out
• 100 foot of 21/64 inch diameter galvanized wire rope with looped thimble; latched clevis hook and red warning area
• High speed; 3-stage planetary gear box

Product Description

Keeper is ideal for the heaviest loads and packed with features essential for efficient and reliable operation. The high efficiency, 3-stage planetary gear box and 5.5 horse power motor are powerful and have a pull line rating of 9,500 pounds. The automatic full load holding brake and standard 4-way roller fairlead allows for easy control of a large load. Warning paint at the beginning and end of the galvanized wire rope ensures safety. Maximizing winch safety and performance is as simple as attaching the proper accessories. Keeper Winch offers pulley blocks, portable mounting systems, flatbed mounting plates, recovery straps, and many more accessories designed for your specific needs.

Keeper KW95122-1 12V DC Heavy Duty Winch with Wireless Control - 9500 lbs. Capacity Review

Length:: 2:11 Mins

I wanted to wait to write this review until I had the opportunity to fully test this winch. That means getting it mounted on my Jeep and taking it off-road and getting myself stuck. However, I decided to start this review before that for 2 reasons. First, not many people know about the Keeper name and second, I want to correct some statements that have been made in other reviews I've read.

I'll start by giving a quick background of my use and knowledge of winches. I go off-roading quite a bit in my Jeep with an off-road club. Winches are a necessity and most of us have them on our rigs. The people who have been doing this for a long time tend to rely on U.S. made winches by companies like Warn (the leader) and Superwinch. Newer people like myself have begun looking for value and quality which we started seeing coming out of brands like Smittybilt and Rugged Ridge. These winches are mostly made in the same plant in China and have proven to be mostly reliable with no real failure rate any higher than U.S. made ones. These companies tend to select the manufacturer very carefully to avoid fiascos that other compnaies see when outsourcing the work. Because of the success of these companies, others have followed so there has been a huge amount of new winches to choose from. In general, they are all about the same so you have to select the features you want such as cable or synthetic rope, wired or wireless remote, line strength and length. With such a huge universe to choose from now like Smitty, Rugged Ridge, Recon, Quadratec, etc..it is easy to find what you need. What this has also done has created prices to fall sharply in the last 2 years. $300 buys a very solid chinese made winch that can be reliable if cared for properly. It has also forced companies like Warn to start producing cheaper winches in the $500 range to try and maintain the market share.

The Keeper winch is priced like the U.S. made lower budget winch, however, it is made in China. Others have stated that this is a great price for a 9500 pound winch with cable line. Unfortunately, the current price at the time of this review puts it in the $500+ range which makes this the most expensive chinese made winch on the market. You can easily get a chinese made winch with 10k pull strength with a synthetic line for less money than this one with a cable line. I am not sure on how Keeper is trying to position themselves with pricing but they will be having a hard time competing unless this winch has a feature not found on others. So far, I have not seen any feature that stands out.

Included in the box is the winch itself, all of the mounting hardware, the fairlead, wires, one wired remote control and 2 wireless remotes. I do like the fact that you get the wireless along with the wired but this feature is not unique to the Keeper. Others offer this as well like Recon (I think its Recon). But still, its a nice feature. Others have stated that this comes with other accessories (if you read the description of the winch on Amazon it mentions them), however, this does NOT come with them. Hopefully any reviewers that stated that it comes with all those accessories will edit their review as it is super misleading. Those other accessories will add hundreds of dollars to the over cost if you went and bought them.

The winch is heavy duty weighing in at around 90 pounds or so. This will weight your front bumper down quite a bit but it is not unusual for a winch with a cable line. The setup and look of it looks very familiar to the new Quadratech winches that hit the market earlier this year but with a different color pattern. I am guessing, like others, this winch is made in the same factory as other brands. That is actually a good thing if its true since they have been very reliable.

I currently use a Smittybilt XRC10 Comp winch which has a synthetic line and a pull capacity of 10K. I haven;t used a cable winch so I am a bit new to the differneces in spooling and maintenance. Luckily, the cable comes already spooled on the winch (unlike my synth line with my Smitty) and most of the gus in my club run cable so I'm sure they will bring me up to speed.

So that is it for now and I will update this in a few weeks as I know I will be using it quite a bit at my July club run which is at one of the hardest trails we run all year. I will try and upload some pictures for others to see of the box and stuff that came with it.

Update*** August 16, 2012***

Just wanted to give an update on this winch. Finally got it mounted and got to use it on my July wheeling trip in western MA. I was a bit scared at first as we started seeing some smoke coming from the solenoid during a re-spool before we hit the trails. During installation of the winch (very easy), the line came a bit loose so we wanted to make sure it was nice and tight in case we had to use it. So during the re-spooling, smoke started to appear from the solenoid so we quickly stopped. After asking some of our more "expert" off-road members, they suggested that it is most likely just factory burn off but we took some PB blaster and soaked down the cable. That seemed to help so perhaps it was just the brand new line causing the issue...not really sure.

On our second trail, at the first main obstacle we got to, a guy driving an older CJ thought it would be a good idea to try and go up the obstacle on the right side vs. the left side that everyone else was doing. He ended up wedging himself in between a rock wall and a bolder and then destroyed his transfer case, rear driveshaft and front axle shaft. Yup...winch time!!!. so we hooked up the winch and successfully pulled him out of the wedge. We saw no smoke at all even under a fairly heavy load.

The winch itself is pretty fast. Compared to my Smittybilt, it is probably a tiny bit slower but I'm OK with that since this one uses a cable rather than sythetic line.

I do want to note a few more things about this winch and company.

The connector on the winch was cracked (the plastic piece that is bolted onto the solenoid). It worked but I was afraid that after a few times plugging in the remote, I would end up pulling it off completely. So I contacted Keeper Winch to see what they can do for me. The e-mail address in the winch manual did not work so I had to call the 800 line which got me someone in California at the parent company which apparently bought Keeper products a little while ago. Keeper winch is located in CT (strange that CT seems to be home to a few winch companies like Superwinch!). They transferred me to the CT office and I spoke to a very nice woman who tranferred me to one of their tech guys. 10 seconds on the phone and he said "yup, I'll send you a new one". A few days later, the replacement part showed up at mey house. So very good customer service!!

Final item is on the wireless remote. I do NOT like it. It has a delay between hitting a button and the winch reacting to it. This creates a small issue when spooling the line and trying to do small bits at a time. If someone yells stop...I want it to stop and not keep pulling in for a few seconds. So I prefer the corded winch line which acts more like other winches I've used.

Oh, one more final things....the LED light built into the corded winch line is AWESOME!!! Very bight and is useful around the Jeep when you need to check the undercarriage.

I have some video of the winch in action. I will try and upload it as soon as I can.

I uploaded some video. First part was re-spooling the line and the second part was winching out a guy who tried something stupid.

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