Winch Reviews

Lewis Winch
From time to time one comes across a product in the marketplace that is so ingenious it makes you stop and take a “WOW” moment. If you’ve never seen nor heard of the Lewis Winch. prepare yourself for such a moment.

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Lewis Winches are now being made by Cannon Manufacturing, a company started in 1954 by a guy named Ernie Cannon who started a chain saw repair business in the Pacific Northwest. Ernie learned how poor design can lead to chain saw failures so he came up with a better chain saw bar and began selling his bar to the McCullough Chain Saw Company.

Flash forward to the logging industry and an unidentified need. When most people think of logging they think of big machinery and big trucks but the process starts with a couple of guys going into areas accessible only on foot and clearing them so the big stuff can get in. Cutting down trees and heavy brush to clear an area is actually the easy part. Then what do you do with what you have just cut down? You have to haul it out and that requires some kind of winch.

So here you have these loggers lugging in heavy chain saws and heavy portable winches. Suppose you could come up with a winch that could be directly attached to the chain saw to make use of its motor to do the pulling? And that’s the design behind the Lewis Winch — it’s basically an attachment for a chain saw.

The Lewis 400MK2 Winch
This Winch will fit any chain saw with a 3 to 7 horsepower motor. With a 7 hp chain saw, the Lewis 400MK2 has a pulling capacity of an amazing 4000 lbs, which you can double to 8,000 pounds by adding a snatch block to the line. With that kind of line pull capability you could even use the Lewis 400MK2 to pull a vehicle out of the mud! It comes with a 3/16th 150 foot aircraft cable, but a 1/8th 250 foot cable is available as and accessory add on. The Winch bolts direclty to your chainsaw over the studs and uses the horsepower of the saw to do the work. You simply secure one end of the winch to a heavy counterweight — like a tree — and the other end to the load to be pulled and you’re ready to go.

If you think a moment about the functionality of this amazing product you’ll realize it’s not just for loggers in the Pacific Northwest where it was born. Any farmer, rancher, or homeowner with a lot of land, can use the Lewis 400MK2 for a variety of pulling and clearing applications. Cannon has recently redesigned the winch with improvements like a single cast gearbox and drum housing instead of a welded housing and other modifications to reduce the overall weight of the Winch. And if this Winch isn’t functional enough for you on its own, consider this. You can buy an accessory which allows you to attach the Winch to a rear or front trailer hitch on your vehicle. This not only eliminates the need to find a tree to use as an anchor weight, it also increases the pulling power of the winch! If you have a chainsaw, you might want to do yourself a favor and look into the Lewis 400MK2 Winch.