So, my first ride on my 2016 850 XMR didn’t go exactly as planned. After some very light cruising around to seat my belt, I decided to try some very light mud with friends. (2-2.5 feet at most.) While the XMR was a real beast in the muck, (very pleased with the bike itself), I did run into one very troubling issue.

When winching out a friend who had high sided on a submerged stick, (1st time I used the winch), the winch just died. The funny part was, the winch hadn’t even began to pull tight. (No tighter than 2-3 men could pull the cable, maybe 300-400 lbs of force.) All of a sudden I got a grinding noise from my winch and it wouldn’t go forward or backwards. (Real fun as I had 40 ft of cable out.) We tried to figure it out in the field, but given the poor weather and general mud up in the winch area, we gave up and I rode 5 kms home with the 40 ft of extended cable wrapped around my front bumper. Not exactly a good first ride for a nearly 20K bike…

When we got back to my garage, we cleaned the bike off and discovered that the winch had literally exploded. It had split its casing lengthwise along the tip of the winch and its internals were reduced to metal shavings. She is going back to the dealer to have it replaced tomorrow, but I was wondering if anyone else has had this issue or any thoughts on what might have happened?