I just wanted to help set at ease the minds of anybody who is considering mounting a winch on their outlander. I was a little suspicious of the ‘winch ready’ mounting that the dealer advertised and they were not about to throw in a winch on my new ATV so i decided to DIY it up with a KFI Stealth 3500 lbs winch from amazon. The dealer didnt seem to know that much about the actual winch installation and thats why I am posting this.

The winches solenoid mount is directly under the right (when on the vehicle) fender wheel well and consists of a 3 point threaded mount with power and ground wires already to plug in.

The holes are threaded for a warn provantage winch which uses smaller bolts than my KFI so i used an appropriate sized drill to open the holes up for its bolts, lock washer and nuts.

If you are unable to use the threads and have to drill the holes you will want to remove the relays temporarily that are directly behind the solenoid mount. They are secured with one bolt (14mm?) and you can just push them asside.

There is a keyed accessory wire underneath the digital display that has a white end on it and also has a grounding wire. You can simply splice into the hot wire with a wire splice (the KFI winches come with 2 splicers or you can simply strip and twist on and tape over the power.

The winch wires are very straight forward and will require you to take off the right (when on the vehicle) plastic panels above the footwell. They use several plastic push pins under the same side wheel wells and a couple under the seat.

You can use a tool such as this to remove the pins although i used a flat head screw driver:

If the pins are damaged they are available at any autoshop or your big box home improvement stores (and of course amazon)

One thing to note is that if you have the KFI winches the red and black cables are supposed to go from the solenoid to the battery but are MUCH too short and the blue and yellow cables are MUCH too long to go to the solenoid and you can swap them out all the same. Yellow and blue from the winch to the solenoid and red and black to the battery from the solenoid. The kfi manual has it the other way around.

The hand mount bolts right to the handle bar but you may need to move the brake lever to fit the mount and the wires will follow the brake line down into the frame and out the same wheel well

Many of you are probably thinking well duh i knew that already! But my intent is to reassure those less familiar with such applications that they should not be afraid to save the money on a DIY winch install.