Help, winch wiring issues

[kwmtrubrit]

First let me say that I know that this winch unit looks like a peice of :censored: and not really looking for comments about that. As I understand, it was made some 20yrs ago. The one thing you will notice is that it is mounted on wood. If I can get everything else figured out, I may upgrade the mounting stuff. Right now I don't have the time, equipment, nor funds to get a metal frame made. This is a club winch, but it has not been used in years, plus there's really only four of us that would use it. The club dues are only $5.00 per year with a much larger membership than us four, but a new winch is not in the cards. O.K, This winch needed a braking unit (done) and only had one solenoid. It runs fine with one solenoid, but when I connect up the second one, nothing. I have looked and looked at this damn thing and can't figure out what is missing, or connected up incorrectly. I have taken some pics, see if you guys can figure it out. Thanks in advance.

[Jose E Bruzual]

You say it works with one solenoid, have you tried swapping the solenoids, to see if one of them is not working...

you might want to double check it against the assembly drawings in Superskeg.com, mine uses two solenoids, and it works.

http://www.superskeg.com/wn2.html

[easyed]

I think you will find that the solenoids are interinally grounded so you will need to jumper the power wire to the same termals on both solenoids.

[O.L. Adcock]

Can you hear a solenoid "click"?? If not it's in your pedal circuit. If so, one or the other is not energizing. You can jumper around them one at a time and find which one isn't kicking...O.L.

[Phil Barnes]

Your new solenoid does not have a ground connection. You should move the white wire to the opposite terminal on the old solenoid. I think this will make a ground connection to the new solenoid's control circuit and allow it to operate.

I'm not sure what Easyed means by "internally grounded". I think he knows more about the internal workings of these solenoids than I do. But I think he may have noticed the same thing I did though; Not only does the new solenoid not have a ground connection on the control circuit but the old solenoid does not have a power connection to the control circuit. But I think the old solenoid will get a power connection to the control circuit as soon as the new solenoid activates, you just need to provide a ground connection so the new solenoid can activate.

OK, this will be the second edit of my post. I'm thinking about this while I cut foam so I keep getting a clearer and clearer picture of the situation (at least I hope I have it right, I could be completely wrong). Easyed's idea was to get power to the old solenoid's control circuit. My idea was to get ground to the new solenoid's control circuit. probably the best idea is to do both. My idea of ONLY moving the white wir'es connection to the old solenoid would have the two solenoids working one after the other, the old solenoid can't operate until after the new solenoid does. If you also provide a direct power connection to the old solenoid then both solenoids can operate simultaneously.

I think the fundamental mistake you made was that you connected the control circuits of your two solenoids in series. You should have connected the control circuits of the two solenoids in parallel.

[rogerflies]

That style solenoid is available in three types:

Type 1 has only one terminal for the coil. The other side of the coil is connected to the metal mounting bracket for grounding.

Type 2 has two terminals. One (marked S) is for the coil. The other (marked I) is for the ignition to bypass a resistor when the engine is being started. The other side of the coil is connected to the mounting bracket for grounding. This is the most common type.

Type 3 has two terminals for the coil. One is for power, and the other is for grounding. There is no internal connection to the mounting bracket.

I can't tell whether you have type 2 or 3, and I can't tell what the old one is, either. It's hard to tell how to wire it up without knowing what type solenoids you have, but the power has to connect to one side of both coils, and the other side of both coils must be connected to ground. That puts the coils in parallel as mentioned above.

It looks like the footswitch is being used to complete the ground circuit and you have type 3 solenoids. If that's the case, you need a wire from the positive battery cable to one terminal on each solenoid, and you need a wire from the other terminal on each solenoid to the toggle switch.

Roger

[sleep4]

This diagram might help

http://isoar.ca/~andrewm/rc/winch/wiring.html

[Phil Barnes]

sleep4, that's a great link which has now been saved in my winch folder.

Just to point out a couple things that are different with the winch in this thread though:

This winch is built on a wooden base so the solenoids can't be connected to ground through contact with a grounded frame. So this winch will need to have ground supplied with wires. Simply moving the white wire to the other post on the old solenoid will accomplish this.

The diagram is also different from this winch since it shows the foot switch and safety switch in the power cables rather than ground cables (Roger mentioned this also).

[Phil Barnes]

I think all you need to do is to add a power connection to the old solenoid and move the ground connection so that the new solenoid is connected to ground as shown below. I believe this agrees with all of the advice given so far in this thread. The new power lead may not even be needed for the winch to work. It simply allows both solenoids to activate together rather than the second (old) solenoid activating only after the first (new) solenoid activates.

[kwmtrubrit]

My gosh, a ton of information, thanks guys.
I didn't know that there are three types in this style of solenoid. That could be one of the issues. Not being on a metal frame with a "natural grounding" certainly adds to the complication. Add to that the age of everything..... The foot pedal is a bit sus to poor contacts too. I will be investigating this afternoon on this winch. I may make a circuit strip out of flattened copper tube to put the grounding issue to bed, then just re-wire the :censored: thing. Phil, how did you draw the lines and add text to the picture? That would have helped me show more detail in the pictures first shown.

Keith

[Phil Barnes]

1) I clicked on your picture so that I got the near full screen shot of your picture on my computer screen.

2) I copied this screen shot to my clipboard. This is done by pressing the "control" and "print screen" buttons simultaneously.

3) I opened my MSpaint program and copied the clipboard onto that screen.

Steps 2 & 3 above are just a copy and paste from my computer screen into an MSpaint screen.

4) I used the features of the MSpaint program to erase part of the original white wire and draw the new wire positions.

5) I saved the new picture as a .GIF image so that it would not be a big file and uploaded that into RCgroups.

Let me know if that description is detailed enough. I was taught how to do that by other RCgroups members my self not long ago.

Please also let us know how the winch rewiring goes.

I don't think it will matter which type solenoid you have as long as you get power and ground to each of the solenoids and wire them in parallel. The fact that you have a wooden base simply means that you need to run actual wires to both power and ground rather than counting on the grounded frame to also ground the solenoids.

I do still wonder about the aparent backwards wiring of your solenoids though. It looks like you have little jumper wires from one terminal of each solenoid to the base of each solenoid. This looks like the way you would normally ground the the solenoid to a metal frame. The odd part is that your setup is using this terminal of the solenoid for power rather than ground. So if you try my new wiring suggestions and it doesn't work, this could be the problem also.

[kwmtrubrit]

Eureka!! Thanks Phil, I moved the ground wire and the crazy thing worked. Thanks to everyone else for responding. I will be keeping the info for future mods, i.e. a metal frame.

Keith