OK - Seems we have two discussions going on here.
1) Fuse. I want to fit something, so as to protect the batteries from a dead short in either the winch motor itself, or in the wiring. It runs through the engine bay and out under the bar - wouldn't take much for the insulation to rub through at a contact point, or for a stick to spike up and jag the cables. The big cable will be able to dump a lot of power very quickly, and you'd be into exploding battery territory. Which is something I don't want to happen. I recognise it'll be hard to find a fuse in the order of 600-800A, but I haven't even started looking yet. Surely there's something out there for a marine application, or something from the high-end car stereo world.
That said, it sounds like people don't run fuses inline with their winch power. That makes me nervous, but if everyone's doing it and no-one's having a problem, maybe I'm overthinking things.
2) The power isolation. I like the Tigerz cable, and almost ordered one last week. Unfortunately they're out of stock, and won't arrive till early June. I may yet just order one, but I would prefer to get this all sorted before then. I was intending to drop into a local welding shop, see if they've got any welding lead extension plugs for cheap, as I believe that's what the tigerz cable uses.
I thought about a big marine start switch, but they're expensive when you get into the size needed, especially considering the price of the tigerz alternative. Roo - is that the sort of switch you're referring to? Do you perchance have a link for the switch you mentioned? Might be an option for me - I like switches
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In the short term - I really like kylarama's suggestion of fitting a longer bolt to the post and using a wingnut. It's low-tech, but it works and lets you put it on or off with ease.
As for :
but the only reason I knew they were there was because I've seen them on some vehicles and thought to myself 'wonder what would I happen if some dump pr!k (in a car park) shorted out the 2 x exposed wires for the winch' 
Has anyone actually had this happen to them? I know it's a popular story on forums - "someone's mate's cousin's dog's wife's friend found his car ripped in two after youths spooled out the winch, attached it to his towbar, and then shorted the winch terminal". But I've never spoken to anyone who's even had their winch even tampered with whilst it's sitting in a carpark. I don't doubt it could happen, but it just doesn't ever seem to actually HAVE happened. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.
Does anyone actually have any first-hand experience of having had their winch tampered with?
Back to the actual topic at hand.
Winch is in the bar and mounted up properly. I needed to get some longer bolts to mount the fairlead on the outside - the M10x30 bolts supplied were not long enough. Of course, you can't buy M10x40 bolts, so I ended up with 45mm long ones that I needed to shorten with a hacksaw. Worked well, fits perfectly.
The rope has been spooled on now, and the winch worked well. Running it in short 10 sec bursts resulted in no heat build up, which is what you'd expect in a no-load situation. Gearbox turned well, although the freespool is still VERY tight. I'll re-assess after a few more cycles of rope off/on.You couldn't fit any more rope onto the drum if you tried, so it's going to be interesting in a proper recovery situation, where the rope might not end up so neatly spooled on.
At one point, the winch refused to power in. WE had ~half the rope on, and J hit the button to add on another couple of metres. The solenoid was dropping home, but the winch wasn't working. After a couple of tries, I grabbed the multimeter to test out the connections, see where it was failing. Unfortunately, the next time J hit the button it started working, and didn't miss a beat for the rest of the day. So not wure what was going on there, but it looks like I need to go over the electricals. That's OK - as previously mentioned I'm going to rewire the winch to control box cables, so I'll fix it all up then.
ATM, the control box is simply cable-tied to the grill. I'll need to make up a bracket to hold the box - the supplied brackets are designed to hold the box on the winch itself, which is no good for us Aussies that hide them inside our bars. It won't be too difficult.
Currently I have the cable hooked onto one of the recovery points under the front. I had bought an eyelet to mount to the bar, so I could attach the cable up high. Unfortunately the largest eyelet available on Saturday was still too small for the winch hook. So I'll have a look through the Whitworths catalogue, I'm sure there's something that will suit.
Cheers!
Matto
