About Lewis Winch

So when Mr. Lewis decided to retire and close the Lewis Winch factory in 2002, his customers and dealers decided to take matters into their own hands and do something about it.

One of those loyal customers contacted our machine shop in Vancouver, British Columbia - and persuaded us to accept the challenge of taking over where Mr. Lewis left off.
So in 2003, we started producing the Lewis Winch in Canada. We had to work extra hard to be able to be in full production in time to be included in our U.S.A. distributer’s (Bailey’s) “Christmas 2003 Sale Catalog”.

Somehow we made the deadline and all that hard work paid off when we saw on Page 65 of Bailey’s catalog under “Milling Bars, Chain and Winches”, a picture of the Lewis Winch with a big, red headline that jumped out of the page and read, “Back by popular demand!”

This is what Bailey’s wrote below that headline:

“The Chain Saw Powered Lewis Winch is back! A year after the closure of the Medford, Oregon plant, the Lewis Winch is available again. This time it is being manufactured in British Columbia. We are excited to offer this new, improved version of the original Lewis Winch. Handy for winching small logs for firewood, pulling game animals from remote locations, slash clearing, even pulling a car out of a ditch - hundreds of uses. The Lewis Winch 400 MKS fits most all saws. You should have a 3 cubic inch saw or more to get maximum use of your Lewis Winch. It will pull up to 4,000 lbs. with a larger saw (5 cubic inch) and the line speed is approximately 60 ft. per minute. Comes complete with 150’ of 3/16” cable with hook. Anchor chain and saw not included.”

We were proud to have re-engineered and manufactured the Lewis Winch with many new features and improvements to the original design. The Lewis Winch was now even stronger, lighter and more efficient than ever before because we build the Lewis Winch on state-of-the-art computer-controlled equipment that certainly wasn't around in the early days when Mr. Lewis manufactured this portable winch.

Since 2003, we have continued to improve on the design of the Lewis Winch, as well as on its anchoring systems and accessories.

Our portable winch is even lighter and stronger than before because it is now build with a super strong aluminum alloy, which allows us to reduce the thickness of the material in non-critical areas.

The Lewis Winch uses steel gears and shafts, and comes with150 feet of extremely strong aircraft cable. It is also build with a hand-brake and a clutch to make it safer and easier to work with in the field.

The Lewis Winch comes with our new Universal Adaptor Kit that makes it possible for you to use the Lewis Winch with any chainsaw sold in the market today.

We also designed and now produce a new Trailer-Hitch Mount that easily anchors the Lewis Winch to any vehicle with a 2” square receiver-hitch using a unique quick-connect system to securely lock our portable winch to the mount.

All you have to do is set your Lewis Winch on top of the Trailer-Hitch Mount and slide it forward until the anchor shackle securely fits over the lock pin. To remove the Lewis Winch from the mount, simply slide the winch back and lift it.

Our customers love this new anchoring system because it can swivel and that makes it very easy for anyone to wind up the winch cable evenly on the winch spool.

We’ve also come up with two sizes of Snatch Blocks that are very popular. The Lewis Winch Snatch Block attaches to a stationary object and allows our portable winch to pull at angles and around corners!

Furthermore, using one Snatch Block doubles the pulling capacity of our portable winch from 4,000 pounds to 8,000 pounds.

We are proud of our new Lewis Winch Snatch Blocks because we have designed them with a unique swivel pin that requires no tools to remove or install. They also have a grease fitting that insures a long bearing life for the Snatch Block.

We are continuously working to improve the design of all the Lewis Winch products because although our portable winch was originally designed to provide an economical means of skidding logs out of the forest while doing minimal environmental damage to the area, since then, owners of our portable winch have found a ton of other uses for it.

Boaters use the Lewis Winch as a boat trailer part and an anchor winch. They can easily convert our portable winch to a trailer winch to pull their vessels out of the water. They can also use it as an auxiliary boat winch in case the anchor gets stuck. Some just try to avoid using the electric winches that boats come equipped with, because these can quickly drain your boat’s batteries.

Armed forces all over the world use the Lewis Winch to quickly upright heavy armor. Construction companies also use our portable winch to upright heavy-duty trucks and cranes that have tipped over.

Hunters love our portable winch because they can retrieve game animals without quartering them and from places where even off road atvs might not be able to travel.

Landscapers have discovered our portable winch because it allows them to do jobs that their competition could never accept. Unlike a large machine like a loader or a tractor, the Lewis Winch will easily pull a heavy tree branch or rock out of a residential property causing minimal damage to the landscape.

And our newest market is off road atv owners who use our portable winch as an atv accessory.

Instead of using atv winches that are electric winches that pull half the weight the Lewis Winch can pull, off road atv owners strap our portable winch to the rack on their vehicle and take it with them anywhere they go in case they get stuck in the forest, the dessert or the river they are trying to cross.

So as you can see, the Lewis Winch is one of the most versatile tools in the market today and we guarantee that if you purchase our portable winch, you will find many more uses for it than even we can imagine.