Home-Brew In-Bed Winch

I've been pondering a way to drag heavy items into the Ridgeline bed for a while and finally decided to come up with something.

I've seen other people post on here about struggling to push riding mowers or snow blowers or tree chippers or whatnot up ramps and into the bed. Here's my solution:

I've used this 40:1 worm gear winch before for other projects. It's slow, but very powerful - rated at 2,000 pounds although I wouldn't want to try to use it with that much load. The good thing about it being this slow is that it always stays wherever you park it. It cannot freespool, which makes it slow, but safe.

I had a 10' section of 3/4" black steel pipe laying around. It measures just over 1" OD. A 1/2" nut just fits inside that pipe. So I cut a length of pipe and welded a nut into each end, so that I could thread a hardened 1/2" bolt inside. Like this:

I bought a 3" wide x 1/8" thick strip of steel from Farm and Fleet and cut and welded it together to make a 6" wide piece and then ground it down smooth:

After a bunch more welding and grinding and cutting, I had a pair of diagonals ready to weld in:

The winch bracket is done and ready for paint!

Then hook up the ol' Milwaukee cordless drill and let 'er rip!

Winching my Gravely 52" ZTR: