The winch on my wrecker was not electric or hydro, it was PTO driven right off the transmission, with a strong 350 behind it. I want to say the winch itself had a 16:1 ratio from the tranny output, and then it depended what gear you put the trans in as to what you'd ultimately get out. But you could get ABSURDLY low with it, using so many revolutions of a 350 engine for such minor cable movement it could just about do anything. If the object I was recovering was too stuck to move, that thing rotated the Earth towards it until it was free [emoji2] With the scotch blocks chained to the truck and it sitting perched on them, SOMETHING was gonna give, and it wasn't gonna be the truck.
Sometimes I'd have it wedged and the cable run off the boom and down low through a snatch block and out to the load, it STILL resisted the pull so bad that I'd hear the cable starting to make spooky sounds and I'd stop and set the brake on the winch drum and just let it sit, under tension, and see where it was gonna go with it. That's when you really don't wanna be near the back of the truck. SLOOOOooowwwwly, the load would almost always start moving, breaking mud suction or whatever was holding it. That truck was badass.
My boss told me when he first turned me loose with it that if it EVER got stuck in mud or slop, put it in 4 Low, first gear, and just let it eat at 2500 rpm until it found something down there it could get a bite on, bedrock if it had to [emoji2] He was right, it always did, never had to come after it with another truck despite being sunk in saturated clay to my knees and over the hubs a few times. It was a beast.
Boss was an old farm boy, so he knew what works, and it always had 6 of these cheap Powerking pizza-cutter tractor lug tires on it that made it howl like a banshee on pavement and they were old style bias ply construction so it had "lumps" and shook until the tires warmed up first run of the day...but man it could bite off-road....
![Image](http://media.tbccentral.com/catalog/powerking/product/PK-SuperTraction%20%28NJ%29_fl_large.jpg)