Woohoo! I got both winches working today! I believe the Mog has been sitting idle since about Nov 2001 so I ran the Mog to get air pressure and then exercised the winch controls many times with the engine off to free things up a bit. After taking off the side panels and looking at the electric actuated air valves I guessed that the winches do not power out. The 'lower' button releases the brake which allows the drum to free roll. My wife held the lower button down while I pulled the half inch cable out 300 feet with a Quad.
There is still one push button at the base of the hand control isolated from the raise/lower buttons I don't understand. It is connected to what looks like a large capacitor in the hand control. The first few times I got the left winch to move was the result of holding this button down as well as the raise button. Now that the winches have seen some exercise this button doesn't seem necessary.
Yes, the Unimog is the one which was recently sold on ebay.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1,1&item=4530171942&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT
I hope to use the Unimog to move small trees from around homes (for fire safety) once I get the Unimog restored.
Our county has a chipping program and will chip whole trees or brush up to 7 inches in diameter for one full day for free, but homeowners must drag trees and brush to an area accessible to a large trailer mounted chipper and pile it in such a way that it can be hand loaded into chippers. I have found that cutting the vegetation is the smaller part of the job. Moving and piling vegetation requires the most work and I have been using a Quad to skid brush and small trees to driveway areas. This can be hazardous as I often have to move brush 200-300 feet across 30% grades.
To complicate things further, our state (CA) recently passed a law increasing the defensible space from 30 to 100 feet around homes in wilderness areas. This order of magnitude increase in defensible space requirements means a huge increase in my workload and makes my service affordable only to the wealthy.
I am hoping the Mog will allow me to move and precisely place much larger loads with much better efficiency and safety so that ordinary people can afford my clearing services. I live in an area that has very little flat ground. From my experience about 3 in 10 of the homesites have over 30% grade and thus will be candidates for skyline work which is three times slower than skidding.
I am going to have to learn skyline logging! Any Moggers with logging experience or tools out there please chime in.
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