I am in the begining stages of building a lowboy to recover dead forestry equipment. Shop talk may be the wrong place for this, but this where the metal fabricators tend to be. I can,t afford a landaul. I have two Hyd Cat winches that I will mount on this rig. Should I have ramps or not. Also some way to keep the machines centered on the trailer as they are winched up. Then I will have to unload them, so I was thinking about a pully block at the end of the trailer hooked to the front of machine to pull it off. Any ideas would be great as I would like to have a lot of this project planned out in advance.
Yair . . . partsandservice . Way back I moonlighted on an oil-fields B Model with a Garwood on a chassis mount behind the cab. They had it set up with a crude but heavy duty jib (for want of a better word) that pivoted horizontal off the goose neck. With a couple snatch blocks it allowed the suck to be applied probably twelve feet or so either side of the centreline of the trailer . . . very handy for keeping things lined up or correcting a developing misalignment situation. I reckon you will need a set of ramps. As far as unloading goes I used to tie of to some thing solid and drive out from under them . . . we could run the winch rope out under some times and snatch block to a tree or whatever, every situation is different. We were a lot rougher back then of course and didn't have fancy hydraulic gear, it was normal procedure to back up to a twenty five ton mud-pump and suck it straight on over the back roller of a body truck with the front wheels four foot off the ground. LOL Cheers.
Look at a military tank recovery unit. They are a tractor and lowboy built to retreive tanks from anywhere. The tractor has a set 40 ton winches behind aligned with the duals. You could maybe find a used one.