The major problem with the winch as it was is that the cables were about 2m long. Clearly not long enough to be mounted 4m in a tree. So I had to buy 100m worth of 3-core cable and rewire the entire winch. Since it was prohibitively expensive and difficult to buy 5 core cable I had to be a little naughty and use two pieces of 3-core cable.
My strategy was to take a bunch of pictures of how each end was wired up, take it apart and then put the new cable in. This strategy worked really well except I took the pictures, took it apart, got busy for two months and then came to put it back together. The break away from the project didn’t help…but I eventually [after several serious mistakes] managed to get the whole lot wired up again. My winch now has 11m of mains cable and 11m of control cable coming from it.
The two desks in my office were gradually overtaken with tools, photographs, bits of winch, electrical components and paper pads full of my schematics trying to work out what was going on inside the winch.
What isn’t shown in any of these pictures is that the winch controller has a MASSIVE capacitor in the handle. The intended purpose of which is unknown to me, but an auxiliary purpose seems to be to give me a right electrical belt when I accidentally touched the wrong place. Made my entire hand go numb. I think I should stick to software in the future.