Hi,

Any chance you bought the winch from the Memphis club? If so, that winch
was designed and built by Glenn Lawler, the founder of our club,
Southern Eagles Soaring. I used to be the main winch driver. It's really
a great winch. We never got around to finishing it out. It was supposed
to have controls to switch drums from inside the cab. Another feature
that it needed but we never got around to was some sort of device to
apply a small amount of braking to the drum when paying out line. As it
is, the driver has to lightly ride the brake to manage drum inertia when
reeling out line. I also wanted to go to a long hand lever for the
throttle.

The Memphis club installed a "Plasma" line (like Spectra) on one drum.
Surprisingly, it didn't really increase launch height, but it did have
one very major advantage over cable. It had so little stretch, that it
didn't store energy like steel cable. Steel cable would snatch back
violently on a cable break and throw itself into a tangle. The synthetic
rope would just drop with almost no snap back. Very little chance of
throwing a "birds nest".

I spoke to Derek Piggot once about the retrieve winch. He said they used
heavy monofilament line (fishing line) on the retrieve winch. I seem to
remember that the retrieve winch was something like a 5 hp
Briggs&Stratton type affair. I think it had a centrifugal clutch, like a
go-cart so that it would free wheel. Using a retrieve winch would
certainly speed things up and reduce cost. We used to do 20-40 launches
a day. At 3000 feet both ways, the mileage on a tow car really adds up.

All the best,

Wallace