Carco has a long history in the winch business, and they were early innovators designing hydraulic winches for dozers and pipelayers. Carco is a part of the PACCAR WINCH family which includes BRADEN and GEARMATIC winches. Dozer manufactures like CAT, KOMATSU, and DEERE are trending toward production dozers that DO NOT have PTO drive shafts, especially in the smaller weight classes. Carco's hydraulic winch development will continue to play a huge role in related industries like pipeline construction, oil field construction, forestry, and tile plow installation.

Once of the first Hydraulic winches Carco released for large scale production was the H110. This was a great winch originally designed for tractors like the CAT D7R. Carco’s partnership with CAT when it was released created a little confusion with the model names. In the video below you can see the difference between a CAT made PA57PS and a PA57VS made by Carco.

Over the years the H110 platform has been upgraded with better hydraulic motors, slower gear reduction, and stronger components. The biggest advantage of the hydraulic planetary winch is control! The operator has a huge range of line speed from slow to fast. These winches offer fantastic inching ability to feather the line in or out slowly which can be difficult for a PTO winch. They are hydraulically limited via the hydraulic motor and their access to tractor power is limited to the power available through the ripper or auxiliary hydraulic package on the dozer. All winches give you the most pulling power bare drum and loose power as the drum fills with wire rope and the radius increases resulting in lost torque. This line pull loss is more significant on a hydraulic winches compared to slow speed PTO winches that are basically only limited by the wire rope strength due to the lack of power available through the hydraulic system. To increase line pull CARCO released several more gear ratios eventually stopping at 316:1 and calling it the Carco H140. This H140 is one of the most popular winches for D8T due to it’s relatively low cost and high bare drum line pull.