Clayton Engineering were contracted to design and manufacture the in-haul and out-haul winches that are at the heart of the Vickers BR90 ABLE bridge laying system. This system has been successfully introduced to service with the British Army, and variants of the system are exported on a World-wide basis.

For this application an extremely compact and light yet powerful winch was required. The final design of the winch utilised aluminium castings in order to meet the strength and weight targets for the project. The soundness of the original design was demonstrated during an upgrade for the export market that required a line pull of more than 100% greater than the initial product. This was achieved using local strengthening of the structure following a rigorous FE analysis.