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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Tuesday, October 05, 2010 at 19:59:13 :
In Reply to: Re: Engages front and rear accessories individually? posted by Jerry in Idaho [64.139.238.43] on Tuesday, October 05, 2010 at 17:10:53 :
It also allows you to run each output in either direction independently. It's a neat box. I just haven't figured out what to do with it. These days we have hydraulic and electric drives that make those sorts of things trivial, but if you're a gear man, a box like this gets your imagination going.
I suspect they used it on the wrecker not because they thought anyone would need to run both winches simultaneously in any combination of forward and reverse, but because they needed to drive two winches with one PTO and this was a commercial off-the-shelf box that would do the job. For the operator, it's easier to engage the main PTO and then have one "in/neutral/out" lever for each winch than to have an "engage/disengage" lever for each winch and then have to change direction using the main PTO lever. Perhaps Spicer didn't offer a unidirectional version of this box, and designing and building one just for this wrecker application would have cost more than the savings in unit cost. To mechanically lock it out so that you couldn't run both winches at once would have required additional parts and wouldn't provide any advantage to the user.
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